Childe of the Swans
by Ryuujin Shishou
Summary: We were before the Volturi and before the Romanians. We were the first: we were the Swans. (Vampire!Bella, Pairings undecided) Carlisle spoke: "-and listen, children. Should you meet an ancient vampire like the Volturi, remember: to those who saw cattle be domesticated, we're all just reinventing the wheel."
1. A Prehistoric Fall

_**A/N: **_This story will be **rated M** for gore, immorality/racism/injustice that is not pointed out as such, blood, slavery and general darkness. **PAIRINGS NOT DECIDED**. I'm wavering between Edward and Jasper at the moment: they seem the best suited for this story. Tell me in the reviews which you'd prefer, yeah?

Bella and most other "ancient" characters will have moral values, beliefs, religions, and ways of thinking that differ from what we expect from a well-raised, modern citizen.

_**Edit 2015-07-15: Some spelling errors corrected**_

Disclaimer: I do not own the Twilight Saga or anything related to its franchise. I earn no money from this.

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**Childe of the Swans**

_**Chapter One: A Prehistoric Fall**_

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_**Ca 4000 BC, British Isles**_

A sheep bleated in the darkness of our little tent. Father was snoring lightly from his place on the other side of my mother, holding her close to him as she slept through the howling wind of the night. My husband hiccupped when I turned on the large grass mattress I shared with them and I winced as I roused another sheep. The heat in our little tent – made out of wood and animal hides – was comfortable, even though the hearth was only a steadily glowing ember now. The body heat of my husband, parents and little siblings and the animals helped keep the dampness out, but it was still chilly if you poked a toe out from underneath the layers of pelts and hides and cloths that we had burrowed down among.

The need to pee, however, was stronger than the fear of the chilly outdoors or the howling wind.

With a last, suffering sigh I crawled out from the cozy sleeping area and padded across the pelt-covered ground to the tent opening. Mon, our dog, opened one of his eyes to check what I was doing but then went back to sleep, as did the sheep. I could barely see them in the faint light of the hearth, but I knew that the animals could see me easily enough. I smiled and shook my head. Not even Mon wanted to go outside in the middle of the night during early winter.

Once outside it was easier to see – despite the clouds, both the stars and the moon gave much light at this time of the moon-cycle and I easily found my footing on the rocky hillside where my grandparents had once built this homestead. About twenty longboats away, our land's high plateau gave away to a small rocky shore far below, and beyond that roared the frothing, cold waves of the ocean.

The area that was currently reserved for a latrine was not too far away from our tent and nights like this I was very thankful for that. The cold wind howled like pained wolves around me, between rocks and trees and through chasms, and I hurried to relieve myself before I got too cold. Once I was dressed again I started immediately for our family tent, only to pause after a few steps.

Was that… was that a sheep?

I tilted my head and focused on listening. Yes, it was a sheep bleating somewhere to the southwest, away from the shores.

"Elar?" I muttered, thinking of the ewe that had been lost a few days earlier. Could it really be Elar?

It wasn't something I could ignore. A sheep – especially an ewe as good a mother and wool-producer as Elar – was worth far more than a night's sleep. Father had been ever so angry when my youngest brother had lost the ewe and if I returned it, maybe it would all be forgotten. My brother was still only seven autumns old, and he had cried the whole day afterwards. If that was our sheep… we'd have several days of food in reserve again and a sheep worth's of more wool than we would have otherwise. The tribe could definitively use another sheep once the first snow came.

There was no discussion necessary, yet I hesitated for another short moment. Part of me wanted to go wake up my father or my husband, for I knew how dangerous it was to move alone in the darkness of the night, especially at this time of the year. Mother and a few of the other gatherers had heard wolves yesterday, and I wasn't stupid enough to not realize that dwarves and cruel, mischievous spirits of other kinds would have their eyes set on me if I as much as set foot outside our tribe. But at the same time, I also knew that if I were to find and bring Elar home on my own, I would be able to reap big benefits later. I might even be allowed to watch Wulfric make our new shoes instead of having to go fishing – and get a good excuse to spend quality time with his son Þunor, my beloved husband since five days. Þunor's mother was not too fond of me, but if I came to watch Wulfric work I should be able to get past the sour woman. Þunor worked with his father during the days, and I had not spent much daylight with him since we had given our pledges.

Before I could convince myself otherwise I set out towards where I thought the bleating had originated. For a moment the moon was hidden by the clouds and as empty darkness surrounded me, I had time to think that perhaps it was a trap by fairies or trolls or perhaps a face-stealer – there were many creatures out there that would mimic sounds to lure the healthy into danger.

I walked for a long while, constantly conscious of every turn of the animal trail I had chosen to walk along. Once in a while I could hear the sheep call for its herd, and to be honest it calmed my rushing heartbeat. Sheep were silent when they got hurt or scared, so it should mean that Elar was simply lost or stuck in a groove some-

The ground underneath my feet fell away as if pulled by invisible hands. With a scream I fell forward and down and down and the cold air rushed against my skin and there was no time to think anything but a plea to the Great Mother and then I hit the ground. I slammed down with my legs first, feeling the unbelievable pain tear through my left leg as if through someone else. Everything came to a jarring stop and it felt as if the sky dropped down on me; as if the very air was pressing me down against the cold stone below and forced the air out of my lungs. Could you drown on land? I was drowning on land.

I gasped for air and clawed around me, whimpering as I got a view of the cliff I had fallen down. Water lapped at me from the side and filled my right ear, and I couldn't understand because I had been so sure that I had been moving away from the shore. From above and beyond I hear the sheep bleat again and I couldn't help the cry that left me.

Help me! I tried to call, but nothing but a scream of anguish left me. I looked around, but it was too dark for me to see much of anything.

Many waves of the ocean passed, but then I could finally breathe properly again and tried to sit up, the wounded leg stretched out in front of me. With trembling fingers I touched and poked and prodded myself, screaming out as I touched my left leg at the knee and down.

I stared up at the sky, tears running down my face and into the salty ocean water next to me. The stars twinkled above, and though I was low below ground level – all the way down where the ocean met the pebble beaches and cliff shores – I had never felt closer to the lights. It felt as though I could reach out and almost touch them with my fingers, if only I stretched enough, and though I was still crying I couldn't help but smile. Every star was a mighty god and the night sky was the doorway to their home, I knew this and I knew the stories well, and I wished that one of the stars would come down for me because I couldn't reach them yet.

The cold hit me suddenly, as if I hadn't felt it before. I could feel it creep into my bones, gnawing like I imagined cruel spirits would and numbing me.

Were they demons? I shook and tried to beat the invisible beasts away, but couldn't reach them. I imagined I was already one step closer to the dark undergrown and I screamed because I didn't want to go there. I didn't want the face-stealers to have my face; I didn't want the creatures of the dark feeding on my flesh; I didn't want the boulder trolls to come alive and make me one of them. I wanted to go up to the stars, to the gods I had followed so faithfully for all of my very impressive eighteen years, but most of all I wanted to be whole and safe in my parents' home. What would happen, now that they had no daughter? Would they cry for me? I knew they would, yet I still found myself wondering if they would. What about my husband? What of fair, good-hearted Þunor? He would move back to his parents' tent, now that we would never get the chance to make our own. Would he find a new woman to share his life, all the ups and downs?

I didn't want to die, yet I knew that they couldn't help me now.

I knew, instinctually and through the prodding of fingers, that the bone in my leg was broken and my knee joint had popped. I would never walk again. My leg would kill me slowly – rocks that crushed limbs were infused with toxins of dwarves, and the toxins will make your body rot from within. I would be a burden to my family; unable to move from the cot, bringing sickness and death into our tent and tribe. They would have to feed me and bathe me and do everything for me, while I tried to outlive a useless, rotting leg.

I cried.

Who wants to die? I didn't. I had a family and a home. I had food and cover over my head at night and I was of good blood – I had survived to adult age, a testimony of my parents' skills and my own strength, I lacked no teeth for I used twigs to clean them like my grandmother had, and I had the love of strong and kind Þunor. The tribe would have helped us collect hides and branches for our own tent one day, and we would have had our own children to raise.

As I lay there in the dark, I wondered why the creatures that had lured me here were taking their time. Did they truly enjoy watching me suffer, or had something happened? I couldn't hear any commotion, as I imagined there would have been if my husband or father or brothers had arrived in time to fight the creatures.

"Hello?"

I screamed in fear as someone appeared at the edge of the cliff above, silhouetted against the starry night sky like I imagined a god would be. His skin, even from afar, glowed in the moon light and I knew he was not human. Deep red eyes looked down at me, but not with humor or cruelty or even indifference: instead, there was worry in his eyes that made me chip for breath. I didn't dare answer him and I bit my cheek to keep from whimpering as he suddenly appeared by my side.

I wondered if this was how a face-stealer looked. He was more handsome than I had ever imagined a human could be – so beautiful that I wanted to bend down and ask him to spare my lowly, dirty self. His clothes were as thin as high-summer clothes, as if the cold didn't bother him the slightest, and his skin of which plenty was bare was free of any dirt in a way I had never seen before – as if his skin did not absorb color and dirt anymore. I imagined that even blood would not smear on him and seep into his skin; instead I imagined it would pearl on his skin like morning dew on a flower. Even nature would not dare taint such flawless beauty.

"Oh, dear", he muttered as he crouched next to me, and I whimpered in fear even though I was breath-taken by his beauty. "This is not good."

An icy finger, a dead and stone hard finger, touched my finger and I tried to stay as still as I could. As if I could somehow fool him that I didn't exist. As if it would keep him from stealing my face. I wanted to plead, I wanted to scream that the face it had now was far more beautiful than mine could ever be. Not a sound escaped me.

"I can help you. I can take the pain away, forever." He leaned closer, red eyes searching mine and I believed him even though I knew he was going to kill me. "You will be like me. You will be so beautiful. You will run so fast, climb so high, jump so far. I can make you strong and powerful."

My chest heaved and I felt lightheaded. I believed him now – he was no face-stealer. I wanted to believe him.

"I can't go back", I rasped out, and I saw something flicker in his eyes.

Pain. Pity. Regret.

"Are you really a god?" I asked and somehow – somehow – I managed to lift a trembling hand to his face.

He seemed chocked that I would touch him. He froze, like a troll turned to stone yet beautiful like a star, and when I didn't remove my hand he put his own over it with red eyes so wide that I felt pity grow in my own heart.

"You're alone, aren't you?" I whispered to him. "You're alone. You're no god, no real god, but you're no face-stealer either. What are you?"

I was at his mercy, spread out on the rock by the ocean. I could not go home.

He didn't answer my questions.

"I can save you", he repeated.

For the first time that I could remember in my life, I begged. "Please."

He leaned down with pained eyes and I felt his lips against my throat.

And then the pain overwhelmed all else.

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I didn't try to put the pain into words. There were no words for this pain. It went beyond broken limbs, beyond popped joints and beyond crushed toes.

When it was over – and I had thought it never would – I opened my eyes to a new world. The first thing I noticed was the colors. It was as though I had watched the world through a mist my whole life, and suddenly I could see colors I had never realized existed. I saw the dust in the air dance like fairies in the wind, I saw little lice and insects crawl across the individual treads of the blanket that covered me and I saw the pores in my skin as if I was holding my arm right in front of my eyes in bright daylight.

Then I saw my savior.

He was tall – extremely tall, I thought – with wide shoulders and the muscles of a man used to hunting and fishing. His hair was brown like my own, and his eyes were black with a red tint to them. He had little beard to speak of and it made him look boyish, like my younger brothers, though he had stubble. For some reason he had saved his beard over his upper lip, but though it was unfamiliar to me I felt it kept him from looking too childish.

He was undeniably attractive, though I could easily tell that he was much older than me. Perhaps he was twice my eighteen years – an amazing age for a man, not to mention to be so fit and handsome – but I had to admit that I felt no attraction to him. I should have – he was handsome and strong, and his eyes were compassionate even in their strange coloration. It would not be strange for us to give pledges, but I felt as if he would never be interested in me that way. I had given myself to another, but I knew in my heart that I would not be able to go back to him.

I sat up on the cot where I found myself, studying myself. I would admit that I had not met many others in my life, but I wanted to imagine that I was not hideous and that I was at least a decent match for someone out there. I was healthy and if I may say so myself I felt I could make a very good woman for any tribe, be it at the shore or inland – I knew the ways of life on water and land alike, even if my coordination had never been superb. I could gather, sow, fish and herd; I could cook and preserve food, sheer and milk the sheep. Few of my blood had died in childbirth, and I had good hips and a strong back even if my shoulders were narrow. And though I had no skills to brag about and no special aptitudes at tool-making, I was still of healthy blood. I knew how to keep my family alive, but little more, but I had always hoped that it would be enough. To Þunor it had always been enough.

Now I wasn't sure if it even mattered anymore.

"How are you feeling?" my savior asked me.

I licked my lips. "I feel… light. Like I don't weight much."

He smiled at me and nodded, and I stared in amazement as he pushed away the hides from the tent opening and sunlight streamed into the darkness around us. The rays of light hit him as though he was a precious stone, and light danced around the room as if he had stolen the light of the sun and now radiated it himself. It was amazing. It was beautiful. It was not human.

I didn't realize that I had gotten on my feet until he took my hand in his – yet it didn't feel cold anymore, and I wondered if I had imagined it before. He led me out the tent opening and I ducked under the low edge and then we were out in the open. I breathed in deeply and looked around in absolute amazement.

We were high up with a view of the ocean and cliffs that reminded me strongly of home, as though I could run and be home before the sun had traveled more than a hand length across the sky. The scent of sea hit me and I smiled and tilted my head back as the sun hit me. It felt unbelievably good and I wanted nothing more than to remain in the sun forever.

I smiled.

"We sparkle", I told my savior with a laugh. "Like stars! I am a star in the sun!"

He smiled, and if he thought me stupid for stating something so obvious while he stood there next to me, sparkling even brighter than I, he didn't show it.

"I am Charle", he said once I had taken to studying my own glittering hand in fascination. It looked like I had covered myself in miniscule, white precious stones of the kind my mother adored so.

"Sabelä", I answered and automatically dipped my head and grabbed his forearm in a shake. Again he looked shocked that I had touched him, and I chided myself. But how would I know what to do or how to act? I rarely met anyone outside Þunor or my own family, because we lived quite far away from the rest of our tribe, always at the outer edge even when it was time to leave for our summer home. "They call me Child of Swans."

He smile wider at me and I felt like I was betraying my father, because I liked Charle's smile more than even his. Charle felt like a childless father.

"I scent a good story there", he said with a chuckle. "And maybe I can tell you of my own names, but first there are things we need to cover. Does your throat hurt?"

I blinked. "It… it burns", I whispered, moving a hand to my throat. I hadn't even noticed the pain, but now it seemed as if I had the sun down my throat.

Charle nodded, as if he had expected it, and I felt stupid because of course he must have expected it if he had asked me about it.

"You need to feed", he said. "Come."

He turned east and then we were running. We were running so fast that the air sounded like thunder in my ears and the wind hit my eyes so hard that I should have been crying. I had only once experienced such speed that I could not keep my eyes wide open, and that had been when I had jumped off a tall ocean cliff once with my brothers. Instinctively, I knew I was moving many times faster than that now. Yet there was no discomfort – none at all. In fact, I felt a laugh bubble forth from my throat, but not my own. The laugh that left me was softer and smoother than my normal barking and it was sweeter than the wheezing laugh that escaped me when I lost control; it was a pretty laugh.

I didn't quite know what happened next until afterwards.

It wasn't like when I hunted rabbits in the past, or when I fished with only my hands in the river; there was no endless, silent waiting for my pray to come to me, there was no moment of holding my breath as I waited for the exact right moment to pounce. There was just a scent and a flash and then blood. It was sweet, sweet life that flowed down my throat like the drink of gods, and I drank like a man who had seen no water for two days. There was flesh and blood everywhere and I think the gray matter in my hands was a brain but at the time I didn't care.

Afterwards I screamed and cried and hit Charle over and over while he held me to his chest. There was no rabbit or fish or even deer or sheep. I had killed all those things and more in my long eighteen years, but this was no animal corpse that lay on the ground before us. Blood covered my entire front and I wanted to puke and yet also lick up the wasted red liquid, and my hands were smeared with gray brain matter.

That was the mutilated corpse of a man.

That was the crushed, ripped and bloodless corpse of Þunor.

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**Thank you for reading**

**Review?**


	2. Counting

**A/N: **Hi! Thanks to everyone who has reviewed and to all those of you who have marked this story for alerts and favorites! Without further ado, here's chapter 2!

Previous disclaimers and warnings still apply.

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**Childe of the Swans**

_**Chapter Two: Counting**_

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There was no word that Charle knew of that explained what we were, but Charle told me we didn't need one.

"Are there many of us?" I asked, kicking my feet to and fro like I had as a child. Around Charle I felt like a child, though it had been many years since I was old enough to carry children.

To Charle, who claimed to have lived for four times my father's age – a hundred years, he said, though I could not count that far and could barely imagine so many years – I imagined that my eighteen years must feel like a blink of an eye.

We were sitting on a stone ledge at the shore; so far up that I wondered how there could be air up here. It had only been seven days since I had woken up to this life, yet we had moved across the land until we reached another shore in the northwest where mountains reached far up into the sky. Charle had told me that in the beginning of time, trolls so large that the earth caved underneath them had been struck by the sun as they were unable to hide underground anymore, and the trolls bent over and stone grew over them into the mountains around us. That was why the clouds swept around us like mist – because trolls made mist appear even when turned to stone.

"Do you know how many men live on this island?" he asked me back, and I tilted my head.

"Island?" I asked, but even so I could see what he meant – had we not crossed the land until we reached the other shore? Would it be the same, if we ran far enough to the north and the south? "No. I do not know that."

Charle pointed out at the rocks and cliffs that jutted out of the sea far below and in front of us.

"Count as far as you can", he told me, and I did so until I had counted on each finger and toe two times. Usually, we counted in groups of twelve, but I didn't know how to tell him that.

"Twenty. But there are far more than twenty rocks." I looked out over the ocean, and as if this life had brought me more than just unnatural speed and strength I saw the rocks as if they were all grouped into herds of twenty rocks each. "There are twenty of the twenty rocks here, and more outside of this bay."

Charle nodded. "Take this bay, and imagine twelve of them. Can you do that? That is how many men live on this island."

I tried to wrap my head around such a large number, I really did, but I couldn't.

"Look around, Sabelä", he told me when he noticed I couldn't quite grasp what he was saying. "Use your eyes – forget that you were human once. Just look and do not try to think like you used to. Do not think of it in trees or sheep or pelts – think of it as the rocks."

I looked around, and for the first time I realized just how far we could see from our mountain peak – away and away, to where the mountains continued into nothing but a bluish, horizontal shade along the horizon in both directions. And along the coast I could see the bays: so many that I didn't know how to count them, just like the stars in the sky. And in every bay, there were countless rocks in the waters.

"Each of those rocks are people?" I asked. I understood now, though I couldn't imagine so many people at once.

"Yes. As far as you can count them – from here, I can count _five thousand_ rocks that are not pale blue like the mountains where the sky meets the earth."

I tilted my head at him. "_Five thousand_?"

"I do not know if there is a word for it in your language, Bella, but that is how you say it where I was born."

I wondered why anyone would need such a large number, but I didn't ask.

Charle spread an arm out and gestured at the rocks again. "I cannot tell you how many there are of us, but on this island I know of only five, and beyond on the land to the east I have met perhaps twenty."

For a while we sat in silence. Time seemed unimportant nowadays, when we were no longer ruled by the travels of the sun and his sibling, the moon. There was no need to sleep or pee or eat food, and I wondered if I needed to wash. I had peeled off most of my clothes until I wore nothing but a large pelt around my waist and sheep hide around my torso, with no need for shoes even though the ground was starting to freeze during the nights. I found myself able to stare at a single pine cone for a whole day, enraptured by the beautiful way it was designed, and though I was a dreamer by nature I had never before known the feeling of getting so lost in thought that it would take days before I even registered that the world was still moving around me.

I wondered how it would feel if I was as old as Charle.

"There are many things you need to know about us", Charle said after a while. "It will take many years until you can be around humans again. If you choose to stay with me, I will teach you all I know."

He knew he had me hanging onto his every word. He knew by now that I would never leave as long as he promised me knowledge.

I wanted to be able to count like he could. I wanted to know the languages of other people, after he had said words I could not understand. I wanted to know what was beyond this island I lived on. I wanted to know _more_ – more than I could ever learn on my own.

"Can we die?" I wondered. He had saved me from death – my leg was fine, as though nothing had ever happened to it. There was not even a scar left to remember the fall by. The only blemish I had was the double crescents on my throat from human teeth. Except it wasn't human: we weren't human anymore.

Charle nodded, but he didn't look too worried by the prospect. "Only by the hands of another of our kind. One needs to rip us apart into small pieces and burn us on a pyre for us to stay dead."

I wasn't sure I wanted to know what that meant, so I reminded myself to ask at another time when I had worked up the courage.

"Why do we sparkle?"

Charle didn't know that. He did tell me, though, that I could no longer bleed – if my skin for some reason broke and a vein was exposed like on a hare at slaughter, all that would escape me was my most recent victim's blood and the venom in my blood. The venom, like a snake's, was what turned us into what we were, and it helped keep our prey from escaping us (the pain was paralyzing). Our skin was hard like the strongest of rocks, and little could penetrate it beyond our own fangs.

"Listen now, Bella, because this is very important." He hadn't needed to tell me that: I was hanging on to his every word with wide eyes. "Do you know how two mellow sheep will give a mellow lamb?"

I nodded, because we had bred enough sheep for me to know that only the best wool- and milk-producers and only the most mellow ewes and rams should be bred. For each generation, they would become better if we found new blood to bring into the line – just like my bloodline had been healthy and strong-hearted.

Charle gestured at the both of us. "I am your sire, now – in essence, you are the next of my line, in terms of venom."

I tried to see where he was coming from. "Venom works like blood, then? From generation to generation – only, it is not between mother and father into a child, but between sire and… me? The venom in me was yours, but now it has changed slightly because I am I. So if I become a sire one day, that person would be of your venom line too, and so on and so on."

He tilted his head to the side, as if surprised at how I babbled on, but then he smiled proudly and nodded. "Exactly so. Now, as far as I am aware there are three major venom lines… hm." He seemed to ponder for a few moments before he continued. "Also like sheep. There are brown, white and black sheep – all of them are sheep, but they belong to different original bloodlines."

I nodded, refraining from telling him that there were also spotted sheep and sheet with different wool. I was sure he already knew that.

"Well, there are three kinds of us, I suppose one could say. My sire was almost four hundred years old – he was of what we could call the 'old' branch, or venom line, if you will. I was the only one he changed, and there are few alive today that share the same venom line as he did."

"So we are like white sheep? Not too rare, but not common either?" I asked, because most sheep I had come in contact with had been brown.

Charle nodded and smiled so widely at me that all his pearly white teeth showed – I had never seen teeth so clean and white, without a single one even yellowing and my whole body trembled with some kind of feeling I didn't know how to put into words. I wanted to bare my own and hiss at him. Without a sound, his mouth filled with sharp fangs – as if they shot down from his gums above his proper teeth. I jerked away from him in shock and felt cold rush down my spine, like I was confronted with something lethal that I had to fight or flee from. I thought he looked like a deranged fish – an incredibly dangerous fish with two rows of too-sharp fangs. For the first time, he did look like an unpleasant spirit: red eyed and with cruel incisors.

"We have fangs?" I wondered once I had told myself to trust him, and subconsciously I searched my gums with my tongue. There were strange depressions in my mouth, in my gums, in front of every tooth on both rows.

"We have fangs!" I snorted. "How do I… you know?"

I gestured with my fingers that I wanted to make mine appear like his just had.

This time I heard a slight sound as his teeth receded into his gums as fast as they had appeared, and the crawling feeling under my skin faded.

"We can practice it next time we feed", he promised me. "It is a natural reaction when you go in for a bite, so it will be easier for you to learn how it is supposed to feel."

It sounded logical enough, even though I'd rather learn to do it immediately because it was terrifyingly impressive and impressively terrifying at the same time.

"It felt uncomfortable", I admitted.

"It is a natural reaction. We are still human; still like dogs and wolves – to threat, we respond by baring teeth and either attacking or pulling away. It is especially strong for you now, while you are still very young, but it will always be there. I am your sire, so you do not respond as harshly to me.

"The other lines do not have fangs", Charle continued. "Otherwise our line is the same as the most common one. Then there was the third – I like to call them the sleepers."

"They sleep?" I asked in envy. Despite how amazing it was to never need to go to sleep to manage the next day, I already missed the feeling of waking up from a good night's sleep or a good dream.

Charles moved his head to and fro, as if that was not the whole truth, before he answered. "Not truly. They went into hibernation, of a kind: like bears, or insects during winter. It allowed them to stay alive for a very long time, as they usually hid themselves away while they slept. They've been extinct for quite some years now."

It scared me, that a line could be hunted into extinction – because there was no doubting Charle's face. Those people had been chased by their own kind until they were all dead, and why? Because they were of another line? It seemed strange, but I didn't really know enough of this world to judge.

"Moving on", Charle cleared his throat, clearly ready to switch subject. "We don't age. I do not know how long we can live if we are left alone – but at least a few hundred years."

I couldn't imagine living that long. But I wanted to, I realized. I wanted to live that long and see what would change. My grandparents had been the first of my bloodline to see sheep – who knew what I would see? Lynxes or horses that calmly ate from your hand? Food that could be harvested in winter? Tents for animals only? I wanted to know. Now that I had the chance, I couldn't imagine ever giving this up.

I had never wanted to live like I wanted now. Even though I couldn't go back home, even though I couldn't start a family with Þunor, even though all I had learned in my life now seemed completely useless – I wanted to live. I wanted to learn.

"Our kind never travels in groups bigger than three", Charle continued. "Usually, we move alone or in pairs. Most are mates, some are Sire and their Childe like you and I, and a few are just old friends."

"Why only three?" I thought it sounded nice – three was a good number. It was a small group, but not a gathering, and it was easy to move three around from place to place. There was no need to split up when you needed to do something, and it wasn't challenging to find enough to eat – feed from – for everyone.

"It is important that you always, always remember, Sabelä, that we are not the gods-sent people you seem to think we are", Charle chided me gently and I looked away. I wondered if I was blushing, because I felt like I should be. "Our kind gets irritated quickly, and we are prone to fighting over nothing. Groups larger than three usually disband simply because we're top predators – we have problems following a single leader when troubles crops up."

I recognized the irritation he spoke off – since I was turned I had been having mood swings worse than a twelve-year-old during her first period. That first day I had hit Charlie with everything I had, completely out of control. It had taken me half a day to calm down enough to think straight. Even now, I snarled like a deranged dog at anything that surprised me or frustrated me. I felt like a moron who couldn't keep her upper lip in place whenever anything happened.

"Will you teach me how to count that high?" I asked and gestured at the rocks in the ocean.

Charle smiled at me, and though I didn't understand why I couldn't help but smile back at him.

* * *

Counting was something I came to enjoy greatly. As Charle taught me his number-words – and I found I could memorize them all almost instantly – it seemed as though the whole world was suddenly made up of numbers. I counted trees in forests we passed through; leaves on a tree, pine cones on the ground, the amount of seeds on wheat ears.

Charle also taught me how to speak in other ways – in other tongues. It would take me a long time to become fluent, he had said, as I met no one else but him to speak with. Therefore, about two years after I had first woken up to this life, we decided that it was time to move further away from my birthplace – perhaps even as far as the continent beyond the strait in the southeast.

Currently we were sitting in a tall, lonely tree at the edge of a large field. There seemed to be no sown plants here and we could smell no signs of past human settlements, and so it seemed as if this was not an annual stop of any nearby tribes. My own tribe always traveled the same way, between different settlements where crops and animals would be plentiful for the moon cycle. But the further south Charle and I came, the less tribes seemed to travel: in the years that had passed, I had seen settlements unlike any I had ever seen before. I had seen tribes that seemed to have settled down permanently in little stone homes, with more sheep than I had ever imagined could stay in one place. I had seen tribes that could navigate the waters as though the gods had originally meant for them to be born in the ocean. I saw many tribes that had not yet seen dogs and sheep, and I saw tribes where they could harvest stone and through sacred magic melt it into tools and ornaments of incredible beauty.

The horse-chasers we were currently following were more like my own tribe in that they followed the seasons. They used tents like those I knew how to make and they packed up every other morning and dragged everything with them to the next site – however, they traveled much lighter than I was used to, and Charlie explained to me that they stayed at only two places and travelled between them as the seasons changed. In those places, they had homes of stone, he said, where the chieftain had a stone home with a wall to make _two_ rooms, and where they could store large amounts of firewood for the winter.

There was a large horse herd out on the field, and though they had been nervous about our scent in the air when we arrived – they could smell predators, even if they did not know what we were – they had not strayed far from the field. The grass grew tall here, and the herd had many pregnant mares that needed all the food they could get. Two large, grey dun stallions were on guard along with a few older mares, and a group of colts and fillies kept to the outer edges of the herd – too old to be part of the main herd, but too young to go out on their own or become a herd of their own.

I had tried to pet horses a few moon cycles before, but though I could easily tackle them to the ground and hold them down by their heads it was hardly enjoyable and the only thing I managed to was to cause mass panic in the herd in question. Needless to say, I hadn't tried to approach horses to pet them again. I still entertained the idea that they one day would willingly eat food from a human's hand, because if sheep could be trained I wanted to image that also other beings could be domesticated. I especially wanted to see lynxes living alongside humans – I had only seen a lynx once, and I had been amazed at its silent grace. Charle thought I was silly and childish for thinking such things, I knew, but he always entertained my wandering thoughts.

"Could we feed from horses?" I wondered as I watched a filly prance as a yellow butterfly danced around in the air in front of the young horse's muzzle. "We used to combine boar blood and crushed wheat into these flat blood-cakes that we cooked over – anyway, could we eat that, too? It's blood, right?"

Charle glanced at me thoughtfully, scratching his short brown hair with his nails. I had asked him why – and _how _– he had cut it so short, because it was only a fingernail long, but he had refused to tell me. He might have been trying to keep me from getting bad ideas, because he had told me earlier to be careful with my own hair, as it wouldn't ever grow back if something was to happen to it. I wondered if someone had destroyed his hair once.

"We cannot eat grains, fruits, nuts or meat", he told me. "Only blood. I have never heard of anyone drinking animal blood in any quantities – it tastes bad."

I grinned at his tone of voice: he sounded disgusted. "You've tried?"

Charle snorted and leaned his back against the tree trunk, crossing his muscular arms across his chest. "It's edible, sure, and I've drained a lot of animals whenever I've been too far away from humans, but it's not something I would chose to do if I got the choice between animals and humans."

I nodded thoughtfully, looking back at the horses. A very old horse caught my eye, its yellowish, dun pelt falling out here and there. She looked tired.

"Are there a lot of humans in the world?" I wondered absent-mindedly while my mind calculated how to easily take down the horse without causing lethal panic in the rest of the herd. "Like here?"

Charle smiled like I had unearthed a beautiful stone he had buried for me. "Yes. More than we can imagine, though they don't all live like here. There are places where you and I could run for days without seeing even traces of humans, and there are places where hundreds of people live year-round in sturdy homes, together."

My eyes widened and I felt like I should be running there now – how could I be missing out on so much? I wanted to see these places he spoke off – here I could always smell humans now, if only as close away as half a day's run at our speeds. What would the trees look like? Would the air smell as it did here?

"How can they live so many in one place? And all year?" It was such a foreign thought that I felt giddy, like I had personally discovered these wonders and not just heard about them.

Charle continued to speak for days, telling me of his homeland in the far away east – further away than I had ever realized existed. He had grown up along the river of _Euphrates_, where the sun was impossibly hot and the river water was clear as if it had only just fallen from the cloud-free skies. He spoke of green marches, but not of the kind that I was used to; he spoke of large fields where whole tribes ('villages') harvested year-round. He spoke of _Uruk_ – a 'city' where his family used to 'sell' what they grew to the city inhabitants – and of a 'king' chieftain whom everyone followed and who led a large armed force. He spoke of the laws of King Enmerkar, and the armed men who carried out his order, and he spoke of how he had become one of these men before he became this not-dead creature that we now were.

Charle never ceased to amaze me. I felt like he was an ocean of knowledge that was just waiting for me to sit down and listen to its endless waves. He was twice the age of anyone I had ever met, and yet he had seen a thousand more things than I could even dream of. He had seen other cultures – he taught me that there were other ways of living outside of how I had grown up, which I had never even been aware of. He told me that not everyone looked like we did – whereas I was born with skin the color of milk, Charle had seen those born with skin as black as the night sky. His own human skin had been a glowing tan but it had been from the sun and not from his parents, for it faded with the years of this life. Now he was as pale as I was, as if the color was slowly washed out or as if an invisible layer of dust collected on his skin.

I wanted to be like him: calm and collected, wise beyond his years yet still curious about every new flower and tree we found.

"Charle?" I said slowly, standing up on the tree branch far up in the air several days later. Hunger had started to burn in my throat from our long stop. As a human I would have fallen and died simply from the height and my poor balance, but now I could easily jump down and still smile. "I want to try feeding from an animal. So that I know I can do it if we end up far away from humans."

He nodded and I got the feeling that he was proud of me for thinking ahead. Charle rarely praised me with words, but I was learning to read him so well that it was hardly necessary anyway.

I leaped out from the tree and felt as if my dead heart skipped a beat as the air rushed by. There was something exhilarating in it – like I was taunting death. Falling had lead me towards death but Charle had saved me, and though it had taken me a long time to dare jump down anything again I found it more and more exhilarating.

_Take that, death._

I laughed without care, throwing my head back like Charle had warned me not to do around like other vampires. The horses startled and looked around at the sound, but I didn't care. I could outrun any of them even if they got a long head start on me.

"Charle?"

He looked down at me with questioning eyes from the tall tree, and I smiled widely at him and stretched my arms as if to hug the whole world to me.

"After this, can we go to your home?"

I had never before seen him look so pleased.

* * *

**A/N: To clarify, Bella IS NOT a vegetarian. This is simply her exploring this new way of life.**


	3. Our Kin

_**A/N: **_Big thanks to all who have reviewed and put this story on their alert/favorite lists!

Eventual pairings still undecided (one vote for Jasper so far). I like the idea of Stonehenge – I'll see if I can't incorporate that somehow, but I've finished an outline for quite far ahead of this chapter, so it might be quite a while before you get to see it. Can you come up with anything else you'd like to see?

Previous warnings and disclaimers still apply.

* * *

**Childe of the Swans**

_**Chapter Three: Our Kin**_

* * *

_**Ca 4000 BC, Central Europe**_

To get to Uruk, we had to cross the world – or at least, that was how it seemed to me.

First we swam across the wide strait that separated my island home from the continent. I had learned before that I did not need to breathe, but not since I was a little girl had I imagined what it would be like to swim straight out into the water until I reached land once more. And we did reach land – a land of a size I couldn't wrap my head around by simply walking around.

People here looked different from how they looked back where I used to live, but not by that much. They spoke another language than my own, and so Charle and I frequently approached tribes and 'villages' with only the intention of conversation. I needed to practice these new languages, and I enjoyed the challenge just as much as the locals seemed to enjoy teaching me. Few feared us for long, for while they realized that we were not normal humans they did not know that we preyed on them like wolves, and I enjoyed meeting them. They always gave far more attention to Charle, but I didn't mind: I greatly enjoyed how I was able to move silently among them without them more than glancing at me as Charle talked to them. They were all so different, and they all reacted differently to our red eyes and frozen skin. There was one reaction that was always the same, though: when they saw us in the sun and we would shine and sparkle like stars under the sun, they all fell to their knees in praise, for none had seen something so beautiful before. None had ever reacted in fear at the sight of our skin.

Neither Charle nor I enjoyed the praise too much, but we preferred it above fear and there was no way for us to hide our true nature. Though there was still no name for us that we knew of, people here had their own legends of red-eyed creatures of the night. I had decided to refer to us simply as 'kin'.

It was in these new lands that I met others of our kind for the first time. I had not realized how gracefully we walked and moved, or how impressive it was to see two of our kind walk towards you in the sunlight. Charle could think whatever he wanted, but I knew without a doubt that we had to be the children of the brilliant gods in the night sky – what else could we be, but blessed and sent by the stars? For what purpose I didn't know, because gods did not work for or with humans.

We sensed them minutes before they came within sight, though from Charle's expression I assumed that they weren't trying to pass us by unnoticed. I could hear their footsteps and the swooshing of their animal hides and furs; the rustling of disturbed leaves and the whooshing of air sucked into frozen lungs. My dead body came alive and I wanted to hide myself in a badger's burrow until the creatures were no longer around. They terrified me, I realized, even though Charle didn't. Charle walked with his back straight and his head high whereas I was always crouching and jumping and stalking; he was like a steady chieftain or a moose with a large crown, whereas I was a cautious child or a twitchy weasel. These two strangers of our kin were nothing like us: they walked like spirits, their gaits large and airy as if they would at any moment float off the ground. Their red eyes were not as bright as mine, but not as deep a red as Charle's, and they had their hair in many thin braids as long as my forearm. Their skin was paler than Charle's, as pale as my own, and the blond male was sturdy and powerful. I imagined him as an easily threatened bull, and his brown-haired companion as a sprightly filly. The female was especially light in her steps as they approached us carefully, her eyes darting around and her upper lip twitching as if she was only just refraining from baring teeth at us.

I felt my own lip tremble in response and my limbs tense in preparation – to launch myself at her, I realized in shock. I had never felt such instinctual need to fight another being, save for when Charle had triggered my irrational irritation.

"Greetings!" Charle called in a soft but steady voice, and I thought he sounded then like someone my father would have instantly given respect.

"Greetings, kin", the male stranger said politely. His gaze flickered to me, as if I only then crossed his mind, and I saw the female twitch.

Before I realized what I was doing, a faint growl rumbled up my throat and Charle had put a heavy hand on my shoulder to keep me from leaping at her. I froze and then shook the anger off, labeling myself absurd as the other female seemed to control herself opposite to me.

"My apologies", I breathed in embarrassment, and I wished to disappear and be forgotten. I hated how their red eyes flickered to me and then up and down my body, as if mentally calling me a child and weak.

As if spurred by my thoughts and humiliation, blue flames flickered to life around my field of vision and I reared back in shock as a see-through, pale bluish bubble throbbed around me as if alive. I glanced around once it steadied, meaning to ask Charle what was happening to us and if we should be ready to counter attack our kin, only to see that none of them were paying me – or the blue bubble – any attention. Even as the bubble expanded and contracted around me, trembling and wavering and once in a while brushed against Charle and the other two, no one reacted.

It was as if they could see neither the bubble nor me.

"My name is Charle the Walker", my Sire introduced himself politely once they had exchanged news from the lands we had travelled through. "This is Sabelä Swanchild."

My name sounded strange translated into this new language, but I kept my mouth shut. The bubble wavered further, and though it didn't pop like I expected it to they all turned to look at me. I licked my lips and nodded politely at them all, murmuring that it was my pleasure. The language they were speaking was still hard for me to pronounce.

The color of the bubble around me sizzled, increasing from barely a sheen to a sharper light, and immediately the other's eyes drifted away from me. Charle gave me a second look, as if he could see my bubble for a short moment, but then his attention was drawn by the female and he seemed to lose his concentration.

The blond male in front of us nodded and gestured at himself and his brown-haired mate. "I am Björg, and this is Ælfþruð. We are from the north – from the southern coast of the East Sea."

They were both beautiful; as beautiful as Charle, I thought as I observed them from my new, glowing shelter. Björg was almost as tall as Charle and a whole foot taller than Ælfþruð, with ash blond hair and (what I had come to recognize as characteristic) burgundy eyes. Ælfþruð shared his eye color for obvious reasons, and though she must have been a worn and tired woman as a human I thought she looked like a wise, mystical healer. Their skin glittered in the warm sun, and I wondered if it felt as good for them as it did for me. It didn't look like they were particularly enjoying nor disliking the sensation, whereas I wanted nothing more than to spread out across a stone like a lizard and soak it up. I wondered if I could absorb the light into my skin and shine like a star in the dark. It was worth investigation.

As the three others talked, I observed my bubble. As I moved it followed along, sometimes encompassing several feet of air around me in all directions and sometimes coating my skin like clothe. I could feel it the same way I could feel my legs, almost unconsciously and without knowing how. The more I concentrated the more the bubble twitched around me, fading and increasing in color as well as changing shape, and slowly I became aware of how to command it. I imagined it was like learning to use a limb. I did not know how I moved my limbs, because they moved when I wished them to move, but I had still trained it up from infancy until I could use my limbs with precision. Every time the bubble lost some of its color and faded to my eyes, the others paid attention to me again. If I encompassed the female in my bubble, she became disturbingly aware of me, while Charle and her companion seemed to lose all thought of her.

I slowly and carefully molded the bubble tight around my body, ignoring how it sometimes pulse irately and tried to reach out, and willed it equally painstakingly to fade. It remained with me and I was at all times conscious of it, but as the others retained the ability to focus on me I realized that was how it had been since I woke up. The bubble had been with me since after I fell that night, as if this was its default place and intensity and I had not been able to see its color before. The bubble did not fade from my sight, constantly present like a second skin, but everything was back to how it had always been.

The kin left us, the female glowering at me, and I turned to Charle the moment I could no longer hear them.

"Why did I want to hurt her?" I wondered.

Charle threw me a glance. "It's natural. You are young, as was she, and you both have more intense emotions than even the rest of us. Females of our kin tend to experience stronger feelings of irritation towards other females than at males, I'm afraid – just like males of our kin are more likely to kill males than they are to kill females. It is not nearly as present in humans, but you can see the tendencies present in them, too. Everything about us is increased: our physical attributes, our minds, our beliefs, as well as our emotions and feelings such as dominance, hunger, possessiveness and selfishness."

I frowned. That did not feel good, and I refrained from baring my teeth at him. I knew he would respond strongly by instinct, even if it was just my childish emotions playing up – he would likely tackle me and put his teeth at my neck until I surrendered. I was stronger than him yet, though my Newborn strength was fading and supposedly would continue to do so, but his many years made it easy for him to hold me down through sheer skill and I instinctively bowed to him.

"Are all males more dominant amongst us?" I wondered, thinking of how both Charlie and the other male had taken the leading roles.

Charle shook his head. "It is as it is with humans: some are dominant, others submissive. We should, I think, all strive for equality – only then can we achieve true companionship. Such was the way we thought in my land, at least, and I know that was the way where you grew up." He threw his hands out, waiting until I was no longer tense from the sudden motion before he spoke again. "We are the same in many ways. Males of our kin can be more openly possessive when instincts take over, yes, but the more of us you meet, the more you will realize that most mates are in the end equal in most ways, or at least strive to be so. When you have as long lives as we have now and feel as intensely even the small things as we do, it is dangerous for one part to remain too dominant."

"But you both spoke for us", I said, unwilling to let it go. "It's not that I wished to speak, truthfully, but it seems strange to me."

"You are not a very dominant female. She was young and insecure." Charle shrugged, and I wondered if this was something he had ever thought much about. "Perhaps you will gain insight in the future, when we have met more of our kin and you have had the chance to study it yourself."

I smiled at him. "I would like that."

We started to move in the direction Charle had been taking us, before I was reminded of the bubble now constantly surrounding me. It was surprisingly easy to ignore it, as if I could push it out of my mind. It did not hinder my normal eyesight, almost as if it existed on another plane, and I wondered if it even was real. Could I be imagining it, I wondered? Was it possible for the mind to make such things up, perhaps to handle concepts it could not otherwise grasp at?

"There is a bubble around me", I stated stupidly and caused Charle to stop abruptly. "I could make them ignore me, as if I became but a spirit."

He frowned and then his eyes sharpened as if he was looking back at his memory and remembering how his attention had drifted to and fro during the confrontation with the others.

"Remarkable", he said and to my fascination a smile grew under his stubble. "Can you show me?"

I did as he asked, willing my bubble to expand and glow a stronger blue. His eyes drifted from me before focusing on me with renewed intensity.

"Remarkable", he repeated. "I can see you all the time, but as soon as I am not consciously thinking of you I am distracted. Part of me, unconsciously, tells me to not think twice of you. I can overpower it easily enough by reminding myself to think of you."

Intrigued I increased the strength of my bubble further, watching as he had a harder time focusing on me again. After a while he was able to pierce the bubble with his eyes again, turning his full attention to me despite my shield. We experimented for a while and I changed the bubble over and over, at one moment forcing it out and increasing its intensity and the next allowing it to fade. For each time we repeated, he found it easier to ignore how his mind whispered for him to ignore me.

"I have not told you this yet, Sabelä", he said as we experimented, "but some – very few – of us are turned into our kin with additional strengths. I can only explain it as gifts. I have been called a truth-seer: I know when you lie or when you speak truth, and I see through deceptions and illusions. It is, I believe, why I find it easier and easier to pay attention to you despite your shield. I'd say it is a big deception of the mind. You protect yourself by distracting the minds of others. My gift allows me to recognize it."

"That would not make it easier and easier for you to think of me, though, would it?" I pondered. "There has to be something more. Perhaps it is as you say, that your gift makes it far easier for you – but I think it is also because you know what to expect and how to counter it. I think it would be easier to ignore your mental suggestion if you recognized them for what they were: like when someone who seems nice manipulates you into giving away food."

He picked up my line of thoughts easily, seeming as excited as I felt. "Then, your bubble is not truly a shield, but a projection of subtle suggestions? Everything inside of it is encompassed in the shield, while everything outside of it is urged to not think of you. Here – try to strengthen it while I keep my back to you."

I did as he asked. A few moments later he waved at me to tone it down again.

"Well?" I asked before I could seal my lips shut.

He smiled widely. "I could still concentrate on you, but it was harder than if you weren't using the shield. The moment I tried to listen to your breath, I lost my concentration and my mind drifted for a while." He tilted his head. "I would guess that sounds, sights and scents are what trigger the distraction. If I don't know you are there and am not paying you attention in person, I am no threat to your private space and can think of you without problem, but the moment I try to move my physical attention to you the shield kicks in. I suspect it might also be because you do not have the power to know when others are thinking of you; you only feel the discomfort of their attention. However, it is also easier to break through and disregard the suggestions to ignore you if I can see you move."

"So attention to my presence triggers the suggestions", I concluded, "but at the same time visual stimulation from my side also makes it easier to ignore the bubble? A bit like how you stare and daydream, until something moves and you're awakened?"

"Perhaps."

We continued to experiment for the next few fortnights, both on Charle and on humans and animals in our path. A few times we even met others of our kin, and I always tried to grab the chance to practice my shield, even if Charle by then could easily tell when I was fading out of their minds and pleaded for me to get social experience with others. We determined many things in those fortnights, most of which in the long run seemed quite useless information. Still, much of it was very fascinating.

My shield worked the best on humans and animals, to the extent that I barely needed to think about it to make myself completely and utterly invisible to them. Our own kin was harder to influence, but as long as they were not already focusing intense emotions on me – such as anger – my shield still worked. When another accompanied us for a few days, hunting with us and running with us, it became apparent that while others could learn to recognize the subtle mental suggestions retroactively, none could truly learn to see through my shield the way Charle could. The one who kept us company for a while explained that it was like having warring thoughts, once he recognized the feeling; on one hand he knew what was happening to his mind, but on the other he couldn't summon the mental strength to care enough to fight it.

"You turn my mind against me", he accused me good-naturedly. "It's like every blade of grass and the scent of every insect within a mile is suddenly far more interesting than you could ever be. My mind does not want to pay attention to you. If another of our kin is near, or a human, it's completely impossible to think of you. If you make a ruckus, it draws my attention, but I cannot think of it for very long before the grass is more interesting again."

He left only days later, after he and I got into a very ugly fight over something as stupid and trivial as who got to walk in front of the other. I lost my left arm and got several crescent scars on my other arm while he lost his hand and got ugly bite marks in his face, before Charle managed to pull us apart and I pulled up my shield. I was intent of ambushing the other, but Charle's sharp look had me cowering back long enough that the younger male rushed off in a hissy fit. Charle gave me a stern talking to, but there was little surprise that things had turned out the way they had.

"Lick at your wounds", Charle told me. "The venom will help reattach your arm. The scars, however, will remain forevermore."

I think that might have been when I learned that our kind were truly, by nature or by the gods' wills, violent beings even amongst ourselves.

* * *

_**A/N: **_Thank you for reading! Maybe you have twenty seconds to write a little review? :) It doesn't have to be more than a word or two!

(I also very much appreciate constructive criticism, especially since this is not my usual writing style. I usually try to write "closer" to the POV character (poorly worded as that may be, as this is in first POV) without the kinds of timespans involved here, and I'm not wholly comfortable yet with the more formal tone I'm trying to achieve for this piece. Anything you can tell me, good and bad and just your experience of it, I'd very much appreciate!)


	4. To Uruk

_**A/N:**_

Hi everyone! Happy new year to you all! I apologize that this chapter is a bit late – Christmas is always a busy time of the year, and at our university we don't get the winter holidays off.

_To the amazing people who reviewed last chapter:_

\- Yes, there will be meetings between the Swans and the other very old vampires. I'm not sure how far we are from that yet, storyline wise, but it will happen.

\- I do have plans for her shield, but I'm still not quite sure how far I should let it develop. I don't want to make her over-powered; still, there's lots of potential in that kind of gift. Either way, as you could probably tell from chapter 3, Bella's shield allows her to handle (or avoid) situations that might otherwise have left her dead, which also explains why she of all people might live for a very long time.

\- I know a month is pretty long time between updates (though, I suspect, far from the worst on your alert-lists) but I'll see what I can do to speed up my updates a bit.

**This story**_** WILL NOT**_** be Charlie/Bella. Ever. Please don't worry. **They are not related by blood here, and it felt right that they speak about it.

.

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**Childe of the Swans**

_**Chapter Four: To Uruk**_

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_**3920 BC, from Eastern Europe to Middle East **_

Almost eighty years passed before Charle and I reached his home land by the river Euphrates. We had taken many a detour during our journey, making no haste for we had centuries to look forward to. At one point we had traveled further east on the continent than Charle had ever been, until we reached a land where others of our kind had said there were men who talked to horses. I had asked – more like demanded, and then groveled – for us to go there and see part of my dream come true, and though Charle had not been easy to sway I had managed in the end. Grudgingly he had later admitted that he was happy I had managed, for it was a sight to see.

The horses, many of them other colors than the different duns I was used to, were breathtaking. They pranced and shied away, came back to the humans like waves lapping at the pebbles and cliffs of the shores back home, and they nickered and threw their heads with more spirit than I had ever seen. They felt more alive than I had seen even dogs be, and I envied their energy as they kicked and reared and bucked. If the humans were gentle and still enough, the younger animals would allow themselves to be fed and petted. The tamed animals were bound by their heads and held in ropes, while the untamed pranced nervously at the edges of the human camp – all hungry for attention and curious about these humans who fed them instead of only hunted them, but too skittish to allow anyone too near. They had to be either reared by humans or broken in, the humans told us, and it was obvious how they prided themselves in telling us. We listened attentively to all they had to teach, and after almost two years of living with them we could both approach a young horse each. They never became as comfortable around us as they became around humans, for they always smelled the predators in us, but just as they learned not to fear dogs they learned not to fear our presence.

We were sitting on an outcrop and watching the sun set over the grass plains, almost a fortnight after we had left the horse masters, when I made my wishes clear.

"If we ever settle, like the humans you speak of in your home lands, I want to have horses", I said. "I may never have need of their strength to pull a load, or as a food reserve or watchers in the night, but they are the most beautiful animals I have seen among humans."

Charle laughed at me, throwing his head back and exposing the throat in a way he only ever did when only I was there, causing tremors of pleasure to thrum through me. Something animalistic, while neither sexual nor physical, pulsed inside me every time he bared his throat, as I knew any other of our kin felt when I bared mine. I knew there were two reasons. He was my Sire, and his visible comfort around me pleased me, but it was also the most ultimate and absolute sign of trust and submission for us. It made my body vibrate happily and caused my eyes to close in a sign of almost the same level of trust, and a soft rumble in my chest made Charle respond in kind.

"Purring", he explained to me. "It is not the rumble you or I will make when we have forced another into submission, physically or mentally, nor anything like a growl of intimidation or warning. It is rare even between mates, even if there need to be nothing sexual in it. Few are as comfortable around each other as we are, Sabelä, always remember that. Do not take it for granted."

His purr made my body relax and I bared my throat until I my spine was fully stretched out, and I reveled in the positive and soothing feelings the sound caused me. It reminded me of my mother's lullabies, or my father's soothing stories of bravery after I'd awakened from a nightmare. I tried to define sharing this with him in words, but was stumped. I tried to imagine that we were singing together: our new voices should have made us wonderful singers, I thought.

"I barely remember my father anymore", I whispered as the sounds in our chests died away. "I cannot even remember the names of my grandparents, or anyone in my tribe. I can barely remember my little brother's face. But… but I think, I think of you as my father now."

He turned and stared at me with unreadable eyes, and I turned away awkwardly.

"I trust you", I continued in a whisper, losing my nerve but set on getting my point across. "Even when I am angry for a good reason, or not, I trust you won't hurt me even when your own emotions get out of control. No matter how stupid things I ask, you have never become irritated with me."

He licked his lips, staring at me, and then he leaned in and pressed his mouth to mine.

For a moment we sat completely still, staring each other in the eyes, unable to breathe. Then we pulled away, both of us making disgusted faces. It was hardly my first kiss, nor could it possibly have been his, and nothing but repulsion had surged up within me. It was nothing like kissing my husband had been.

"No." He shook his head. "You are right, Sabelä. All I feel for you… I can only imagine, for I have never had a child of my own, but this has to be how it feels to be a father. I could never love you like a mate. But I had to know, if we are to spend eternity together. My deepest apologies for kissing you."

I waved him off, because I understood how he felt. I had imagined how it would feel to kiss him too, even if I had never dreamed that I would feel like that for him. After so many years together, often alone for years at a time, it was impossible to never have imagined what it would have been like to be his mate instead, even if I now knew for sure that all I would ever feel for him was platonic love. We had been skirting around this issue for several decades now, and it felt suddenly liberating to have it out of the way.

"What is it like, for one of our kind to have a mate?" I wondered and fell back on the stone outcrop to lie on my back. I felt drained, but still satisfied to know that I had been right and that he felt the same.

He lifted a brow at me, but didn't lie down beside me. I had never seen Charle lie down.

"I wouldn't know", he chided me, but didn't remain silent for very long afterwards. "But it is much like when humans become pairs, only: true mates are for eternity. As humans we rarely find that one – and I believe, Sabelä, that we all have that One – and if we do, we are still prone to leave each other for pity reasons. As what we are now… I have heard it is like physical pain to see a true mate hurt, as if we experience the same pain they do. We care for them above ourselves, but it is also out of selfishness, because we cannot imagine life without them and do not wish to outlive them. To go too far away from a mate can be painful, especially in the first few decades, and most mates never leave each other's side for more than half a day at a time."

I frowned, wondering what it was like to be so dependent on another being. I knew dependency well, of course, because humans had a hard time surviving for long on their own and there was strength and safety in always staying with the tribe, but even in my family we tried to give each other space when we could. Even my mother and father preferred to now and then work in separate places, so as to allow each other a social life outside the family. As a human I used to go for long walks with the excuse of looking for food or firewood, or sit to myself and think while I worked on something. To not be able to be alone seemed like a horrible curse to have bestowed upon one – even Charle and I, who had stayed together for eighty years, often left each other to go hunting or to be alone for a day or two. It was nothing personal: we both needed and appreciated the silence and the opportunity to get lost in our own thoughts or the sight of a pretty flower. Rejoining afterwards made it even better, for it made us appreciate the companionship once more, too.

"It sounds horrible", I stated. "Like a fae's curse: 'You may never again walk under the trees alone to your thoughts'. To never be able to be truly alone to ones thoughts, knowing no one is watching, feeling completely free… never running for a day without seeing anyone…"

Charle laughed at me then: a light chuckle that told me he understood more of what I was saying than he was truly comfortable with. "I wouldn't image anyone who has met their mate would ever think that way."

I refrained from commenting on that, but in the privacy of my mind I thought to myself that I never wanted to find my mate, if it meant that I had to give up the freedom of dropping everything and running in whatever direction I suddenly felt like. I thought of my secret dances under the moon, my silly confrontations and conversations with animals in the forest, and my lapses in attention when a pretty leaf captured my full attention for hours – I would never want anyone to know of, even less witness, such precious and stupidly intimate moments.

"How does one recognize their mate?" I asked.

"I don't know."

We both left it at that, allowing ourselves to get lost in our own thoughts. I liked that about Charle: he had no problems dealing with my introspective times.

From the horse tamers in east we traveled southwest along the shores of magical waters where nothing sunk, down to the strait of the Ox-passage. It was far narrower than the strait between my home island and the continent, but as we crossed we found ourselves stepping into a new human culture, unfamiliar to me. It took us ten years to cross the lush, fertile lands of Mesopotamia, not because it was a long distance for our kind but because we found ourselves constantly making stops and detours.

When we reached Uruk I was not tired of traveling, the way I had thought I would be after more than eighty years of running. My body was tireless, my soul free of the burdens of daily survival. There was no need to fear the winter and the dark, no need to fear the ocean waves that pulled the strongest men under or the snow that suddenly tumbled in great waves down mountains. I had no need for gathering, barely even for hunting – when the thirst hit me, I lifted my nose and let my legs carry me to the closest prey.

Uruk was situated at the bank of a large, clear river that the people there called the Mother, the same way we had called our island's dirt our Mother. I saw few blond or red of hair here, but otherwise they were similar to people I had met before; their hair were often dark and their skin tan from the bright sun. I knew it was hot around us – I could smell it in the air – but no matter how Charle led us through the midday heat I never felt uncomfortable. Our kin did not feel uncomfortable by any temperatures known to us, and though I knew fire would kill us it was the flames that hurt, not the heat itself. When I held my hand above a flame, it did not hurt.

We reached Uruk in the late morning, though we had traveled so far south that the sun rose at almost the same time throughout the year. The first orange rays of sunlight made us glitter and cast of rainbows of light, and as we walked leisurely down the trail (and it was as wide as I was tall!) people stopped and stared. They fell to their knees in fear and awe, and we stopped to dip our heads at them like Charle taught me.

"The more you bend your body, Sabelä", Charle said to me in this newest language he had taught me, "the more respect you are giving. We dip our heads for good people; to the leaders of this land, we shall bend straight at the waist. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Sire", I told him seriously and smiled as kindly as I could at a young woman who fell to her knees.

I had never seen humans react in fear to our skins before, but then again we usually met humans in the shadows and revealed our sparkling skins only once they were comfortable. I did not like the way they looked at us – even with the awe in their eyes, the visible fear made me uncomfortable and itchy to leave.

I tired quickly of the attention and my blueish, glowing bubble strengthened around me without need of conscious command. Charle's hand landed on my shoulder, light and carefree.

"I wish for them to see us both walk through the city, Sabelä – would it pain you so to walk openly for a day?"

I shook my head and my shield fell back, bouncing until it stretched tight and thin across my skin. The humans around us – more and more until I felt like I was swimming in flesh and blood – all shied away in fear and bowed in awe at our red eyes and sparkling skin, but it was Charle they called out to and it was Charle they all wanted to touch. Even when I held it back, my shield protected me from much of their attention. Their hands brushed against us and I felt like both a hunting trophy and the hunter which had brought the rare beast down. It was uncomfortable and my throat burned, but I did not attack them and they seemed only vaguely aware of the danger they were putting themselves in. The air smelled of humans and their dogs and sheep; of food and dust and fire; of sweat and feces and old, dirty clothes.

I had seen stone homes before, but none like the homes built in Uruk. They were built from brown-red pottery, standing in wobbly lines with wide trails in between, where humans were bustling about in masses. It was as if every home, as big as any family tent back home, housed a whole tribe, and they all poured out to greet us on the trail.

"This is a _road_, Sabelä", Charle told me in the language of Uruk as we greeted person after person. "It is a stamped trail, always at least as wide as I am tall and often twice that. The homes are called _houses,_ which are stable and permanent – _buildings _is another word for them, though it carries slightly different connotations_. _The _houses _are shaped like connecting _rectangles, _that is, they have four straight walls and a flat roof. The houses you have seen before have all been round; here, they do not worry about snow."

I tried to take it all in as he spoke, but it was hard even with the mental prowess of our kin. People were calling and screaming and shouting, and it was as if I had shrunken and stepped into an ant hill. Never had I imagined so many humans in one place – as we walked, I counted hundreds and hundreds without end. It was surreal and I wondered if this was how the stars in the night sky felt when they looked at their siblings.

"Hail! Hail, those with skin of the sun!" a clear voice called ahead, and I looked up to see a man rise above the crowds.

He stood, I quickly came to realize, on a wooden platform held up by six strong men and he was clothed in fabrics, the likes of which I had never seen before. The clothes he wore were large and flowing, parts of it colored in red as if he had bathed them in blood until the color could not be washed out. However, as the wind shifted and blew his scent to me I found he smell little more of blood than any human would.

"Hail, priest of Uruk!" Charle called back and at his gesture we both bowed at the chest. "We have traveled far and wide, from beyond the sea where none sinks and as far again to the west where cliffs fall a hundred feet down into the ocean, to see the great city which is held in awe as far as word can travel! The city of my birth!"

The humans murmured in appreciations of my Sire, and I wondered if my pride would make me glow even more than I already did under the brilliant sun. I wondered what _priest_ meant, but did not ask yet. I figured it meant "chief", because it seemed to me as if he was the leader of these people.

The priest came up to us at a slow pace, the men carrying his platform walking as one greater being without the need for words to communicate. Around us humans gathered, more and more until I would have needed to step on them to get away. I had no heartbeat that could beat harder or faster in my chest, but I felt cornered and under attack by the round-eyed gazes.

"Welcome!" The priest smiled widely, and in his eyes I saw the same fear as in the other humans. "Be welcome, Sun-Gods! Welcome to Uruk, glorious city of Sumer!"

"We are most honored, Priest of Uruk!" Charle smiled without showing his teeth. "Oh, I pray – shall we be allowed to view this city?"

I felt there should have been goose bumps on my skin, but there were none. I watched the priest's smile freeze in place, and his dark eyes darted between us and the people gathered. It was as if I was watching a power struggle in my tribe, only I did not fully understand the conflict.

"Please, Sun-Gods!" the priest called and gestured next to himself on the platform. "Join me, the High Priest of Uruk, and I shall show you through our city!"

I threw a glance at Charle, but he did not look uncomfortable and I followed him through the corridor of humans. We took a leap, Charle first and I soon after him, up on the platform and for a moment I was sure that I would crash through the wood like a too heavy stone. I knew we were heavier than humans, if not as heavy as a stone our size would be, and beneath the platform the carriers made sounds of surprise as the new weight registered in their bodies and minds. I stood still as a stone, waiting for the men to give out under us and for the platform to rush to the ground. But the men of Uruk must have been of remarkable blood, for they regained their wits in moments. The platform turned around slowly until we were facing the other direction, and it felt a bit like floating in the shallow, bobbing waves at the shore – only I was upright, and my feet were firmly planted on wood.

Charle gestured for me to stand on the other side of the priest's seat, and together we flanked him like he was our chief and we were about to meet another tribe head on. It felt strange, for this was not my chief – I had no chief no longer, but if I had to follow I followed Charle and not this "priest" – and I did not know where we were going or for what purpose. But Charle had a smile on his face, his eyes so happy that I could not find it in myself to say anything to bring him out of his joyous return home, even for a moment.

We waved and bowed as we were moved down the city roads, and I stared in awe as a building unlike anything else I had ever heard of came into sight. It rose six times the height of any of the other buildings, with four hundred wide steps leading up to its top. Made out of some kind of red, rectangular stones that reminded of pottery, it was a rectangular, man-made mountain worthy of the gods I had only ever dreamed of seeing. We were carried in seats of woven reed and precious stones up the steps of the building, large men like muscular bulls carrying us ever up. It would have taken me but a blink of the eye to climb the four hundred steps on my own, but I would have missed this incredible moment: the sun making Charle shine like a star in front of me, carried up the steps of a man-made mountain. I thought he looked like their chief come home.

"A _ziggurat_", I heard Charle murmur under his breath to me, too quietly for the humans around us to hear. "It houses the temple of this city's powerful gods. Do not anger them, Sabelä."

I would never dream of angering the gods that demanded and were worthy of a _ziggurat_ like this one.

Young women, all my own age and all far more beautiful than I had ever been, stood around the edges at the top of the building. They were clad in pale clothes in one piece that wrapped around their bodies all the way to their knees, with bangles of precious metals and stones clasped around their throats, wrists and ankles. No hides were wrapped around their feet to protect them from the warm ground: instead they had woven reeds into tiny rectangles and tied these onto the soles of their feet. The women all gasped and swooned in wonder as Charle was carried up the last few steps, but they did not leave their positions overlooking the great city. I wanted to turn in my seat and allow myself a look of the city, too, but I did not dare in fear of angering our hosts.

An ornate, rectangular building sat at the very top of the ziggurat, and I judged this to be the temple that Charle had spoken of. We were carried to the wall and put down, and my mouth fell open. A rectangular piece of the wall parted in the middle and was pushed out by equally large men to the ones who had carried us: before our eyes an entrance was opened into the temple, and soft sounds came from within.

We entered after the priest who chanted under his breath as he walked, perhaps to ward off any ill-wishes or deceit we might carry with us. I felt no different when I stepped through the entrance, and I hoped that this was because I brought with me nothing ill. My very bones trembled at the thought of being perceived as a threat by these unknown gods, solely based on my need for human blood.

The priest turned to us and the wall closed behind us. The very room – for it was one big room, with a pedestal clad in fabrics and precious stones in the middle – hummed with energy.

Was this how it felt to be close to the gods? This sense of awe? Or was that just an effect of seeing a city with all its inhabitants for the first time?

"I am Charle, the Walker and the one who wanders amongst Men. This is my daughter, Sabelle, Child of White Birds."

That was the day we were praised as gods who had been sent to walk among humans. I knew better of course, for I knew we were no gods but solely gifted by the stars in the sky to remind of them, but Charle did not agree with me. He told me we were still humans, no better than them, and that we should be grateful for every smile we received.

I still thought that we had to be the children of stars to sparkle like we did, but I silently agreed with him that we were no better than these people. There was so much they knew that I had never heard of, so much they could teach me. If we had been gods, as they hailed us, I was positive I would not have had to ask them to explain their inventions and ideas to me.

We had arrived to Uruk, and it was beyond my wildest imaginations.

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**A/N: The strait mentioned is of course the Bosporus in Turkey which also separates Europe from Asia and Middle East, and which ranges between 3000-700 meters in width. (The Greek name "Bosporus" derives from the word for ox/cattle, thus the name means "ox-passage" or "ox-ford" in English, but I thought the latter might confuse a lot of people.)**


	5. Re-ená

**A/N:** Erh, so, right. Well. My two weeks plan didn't really work out. This is a week earlier than usual, but still… yeah. Sorry...

Disclaimer: I still do not own any source material of this fanfic.

P.S. The reconstructed (they _are _reconstructed, right?) names of ancient Sumerians are hilarious. Seriously.

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**Childe of the Swans**

_**Chapter Five: Re-ená**_

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_**3910 BC, Middle East**_

Under the rule of King Enshakushanna, conqueror of Hamazi, Akkad, Kish, and Nippur, and the supreme ruler of all of Sumer, Uruk flourished into the most influential city on the Earth – he became known far and wide as the great ruler of Mesopotamia. We did not meet him until several years after our arrival to Uruk, but once he arrived he bowed straight at the waist in front of us and all of the people of Uruk. We bowed back so deeply that our foreheads touched the ground, and I was honored to meet the great king whom I had only heard of before. Our arrival had created a wave of political unease and subsequent change that had been felt all across Mesopotamia, but we noticed little of it, spending most of our times in the ziggurat tended by the priesthood.

King Enshakushanna was not like other humans I had met, but it was not just that his hair was almost as short as Charle's and his nose far too large for his head. When I kept my shield at a medium intensity and strength, King Enshakushanna could see through it as if it was not there at all. And though he praised Charle with wondrous gifts and titles, his attention often turned to me during his talks. He called me 'the Light of Uruk' for my sparkling skin so often that I came to detest the title even when others used it, and he would endlessly tell me tales of his journeys and his twenty-one sons, of which I understood Lugal-kinishe-dudu to be his favorite. His favorite story was one of the animals in the far west: perhaps he saw that I was fascinated by these animals the first times he told me about how his favorite son hunted them, because he continued to tell me this story.

It was during one of King Enshakushanna's two daily visits, about a month after he had arrived to Uruk, that he brought with him a woman of his bloodline to the main ziggurat where we had been asked to stay. She had a long and strange name, even for the people of Uruk, but as she bowed in front of us in the main temple she introduced herself as Re-ená, the Flower of Euphrates.

"I am honored to stand in your shining presence, great Sun-Gods", she spoke with the sweetest and kindest voice imaginable.

Her hair was long and lush, of a brown color that reminded of my own mahogany mane, and I imagined that it took many servants to pull it up in its elaborate hairdo. Her face was flushed and her eyes glittered in excitement that was mirrored in the King's, and I felt myself curious of this human woman. She looked older than I by several years, perhaps twenty-five summers old – though I found seasons hard to predict in this strange land – but she had not yet carried her first child. Most women I had met had carried at least two children by the time they reached my age, and I found it strange that such a beautiful woman had not attracted a man she found a good match. Her family (in this land where food was not shared equally between the tribe units, and where different families were of different standings based on their forefathers) should have meant she was a good candidate for pledges.

I glanced to Charle to see his reaction, and my head tilted in confused surprise when I realized he was staring as if spell-bound by the woman in front of us. I looked back at her. Re-ená was pretty, if in a rather childish way, I thought sourly.

"The honor is ours", Charle said and gestured around us. "Please, why don't we sit down?"

During the four-hour long talk that followed, Re-ená did not once look away from Charle. I humored myself by counting the number of times she blinked, bored out of my mind by the ever so polite small-talk that she and her father seemed to thrive off. It thus came as no surprise to me that the next morning when King Enshakushanna came to visit us his daughter was at his right side. This time she was bolder in her approach, and I wondered if she had received a talk from her father to be more aggressive about her feelings for my Sire, because she made absolutely no attempts to hide how her whole body turned an appealing crimson whenever Charle looked at her. I had never seen Charle pay so much attention to another before, and I would be lying if I said it did not make me see red many times. The thought of draining her, tasting her sweet blood as it gushed down my throat, entertained me only for a short while: she did not look delicious to me. Females rarely did – I had found a taste for males. It was something in their blood that made me far more satisfied.

I kept to the background, uninterested in their talks but unable to escape without risking this life for Charle and me. We had figured out quickly enough that we had reason to fear the humans who flooded us with gifts, for they had elaborate – though not fool-proof – plans for the moment we tried to strike at them. The ziggurat was a prison capable of burning like a furnace from the flower oils in which they soaked their lamps of animal fat: we would be burning like insects. If we had truly wanted, even their plans of fire could not have kept us locked up, for we could have killed them all without raising alarm and we could burst through the thick mud-brick walls with little trouble. But to be honest – we had never lived so well. We were never famished, never uncomfortable, and the priests could answer my questions for days at a time. Not all what they said was the truth, or so Charlie admitted to me during one of my more passionate retellings of a good interrogation session, but that was forgivable for now.

The only thing that truly bothered me with our home was how my body itched. It felt as though there were termites within my body, and once in a craze I ripped open my arms to claw them out only to find that there were no insects or illness within me, nothing wrong beyond the venom that seeped slowly through my body. I paced endlessly, incapable of slowing down until I had walked it off, if only for a brief period of time. It always returned. I snapped at people who stuck their noses into my private chambers, and I found myself slipping and killing people I had originally not meant to harm.

"It is wanderlust", Charle told me one day while I paced round and round the inside of the temple. He was sitting on a large and colorful recliner, Re-ená leaning happily against his side. She was playing with a five-piece puzzle figure someone had gifted me with, and the solution was evading her again and again.

"If wanderlust causes this, then I dread to see what shall happen if I am truly locked up", I hissed and swung my arms to and fro, helpless against my own cravings.

Like the first time my throat burned, I did not understand this new feeling that ate at me from the inside. It consumed my thoughts, just like the insatiable hunger of blood we always felt, but it was not a physical pain in a specific part of my body. This 'wanderlust' was something that made my whole body quiver and itch, and my skin crawl and my venom burn in my veins. I had to move, could no longer sit still: I was riddled with a curse of some kind that I could not get rid of. Neither the gods of the temple I resided in, nor the gods of my homelands listened to my pleas, and I wondered if this was some sort of retribution by the gods of Uruk for bringing death to the city. Charle had told me that the gods of this temple would not place any ill magic on us for staying here, but I was no longer convinced.

Charlie was running his fingers through Re-ená's hair like a lover would, her hair so smooth that his fingers never got stuck in a single tangle, but I was beyond caring what happened between the two now. It had been fortnights – I expected him to drain her at any moment. But every time he leaned down to press his nose to her neck and I thought she was a goner for sure, she only giggled and murmured stupid words at him that held no meaning – simply childish endearments upon one another in defiance of all coherent meaning. And Charle would sigh and lean back again and he would have the nerve to smile.

She no longer stayed only as long as her father's visits. Now Re-ená stayed from early in the morning to late in the evening. She ate all her meals in the ziggurat and the priests were muttering, for none but priests and servants of the gods were allowed in the sacred building. But Charle was their god as well now, and his words were law. It did not help my cause at all that even the priests and servants, no matter how inappropriate they thought her presence to be, loved Ren-ená. They thought her flawless, or so it seemed to me. If I had as much as hinted to them my feelings, I was sure they would have fallen over themselves to defend her.

"Oh, but it will pass, Goddess Sabelle!" Re-ená waved her hands in the air excitedly, my little puzzle now disregarded like everything else. "My father King Enshakushanna and the priests of Uruk – of all of Sumer! – are you ever loyal. They will provide you, the Light of Uruk, with any entertainment you crave!"

She leaned forward and her excited brown eyes met mine. That was the first mistake I made. Her lips quirked in a pointed smile.

"Of _any_ kind, Goddess."

All I saw in front of me was Þunor eight days after we had given our pledges and given ourselves to each other in all ways: I saw him ripped apart and crushed, his brain smeared on my hands, his blood covering every part of me as I tried to devour the life he held within him.

I snapped. My fangs unsheathed with sickening sounds and I bared them crazily. She didn't have time to scream, barely to gasp, as I launched myself at her. I could not image what had been going through her brain when she had suggested such a thing to me, not while I was pacing angrily to and fro and threatening to kill anyone who came too close. Perhaps she had thought herself endeared to me. Perhaps she was stupider than I had thought.

Charle crashed into me just before I reached the woman. He slammed me down against the stone floor and the building trembled, whether from the force of the hit or his deafening roar. His hands pressed against my throat, his knees hitting above my hips and crushing me like how one would break a branch against the ground. I felt my body snap under his weight and force, and the anger in me was replaced by sweltering pain. My screech of anger turned into one of pain and I thrashed for a moment, lashing out with sharp nails and strong hands at him, but a deep growl in my ear made me freeze. My Sire growled and demanded my submission, and immediately my body responded: I felt boneless and weak, unable to move. Part of me wanted to kill, kill him and the woman and anything in sight, but I held it at bay.

I could not hurt Charle, I told myself. I could not hurt my Sire. He was the only one I had. I would not be able to live if I killed both my husband and my Sire.

"You will not touch her, Sabelä", he growled in my first language, so low that Re-ená would not be able to hear us. "I love you like a daughter, but I will rip you apart before I allow you to harm that kind woman. No matter what she said."

I whined low in my throat. Shame coursed through my body – how many times had I lost control of myself since we had arrived to Uruk?

"I'm sorry, Sire", I wheezed out even as venom gurgled uncomfortably in my throat. Something inside of me had broken, and while the pain was quickly fading away I wanted nothing but to limp away in humiliation and lick my wounds in solitude.

I was sorry that I had done something that would have pained him so. I was sorry that I had lost control over myself. I was sorry that I had fought my Sire when he had demanded for me to submit – I had never done more than growl back when he pressed me down, even during my worst rages. Only that one time after I had kill- after that first day of this life, and even then I had not used neither teeth nor nails.

I was not sorry that I had attacked Re-ená.

Charle let go off me and dusted himself off, making a show of not caring for his scratch marks as he walked over to the human female and took her in his arms. She was shaking and crying, babbling apologies that made my venom sting.

"I didn't know!" she cried over and over again and rocked in his arms like a little child after a nightmare. "I didn't know!"

"I know, I know", Charle whispered in her ear and stroke her hair. "I know, sweet flower."

Disgust coursed through me. Charle and I had walked together for a hundred years now – far longer than any human had ever seen – and yet there he was, holding a human woman in his arms as if she was worth more than all the blood in the world. The truth tasted like spoilt blood in my mouth.

Charle had found his mate.

It explained why my Sire had not given me much more than a glance for the last year. It explained why he had been so fascinated by her, despite the fact that her attention-span was too short and her skills few and far between. It explained why he snapped at me, why he catered to her every need and wish.

Slowly, my body knit itself together again and my stomach regained its normal shape. My mid-section no longer crushed to the floor, I found myself stumbling to my feet like a man who had eaten too many bad cherries. It hurt, but it was nothing against the pain of being turned into kin and I brushed it off. Charle let loose a dark growl when he heard me get up, but he kept it at a pitch that Re-ená would not be able to hear.

"Come here, child", he rumbled at me and I could tell he was split between anger at me, worry for his mate and guilt at my pain. "Apologize to the poor female."

I desperately wanted him to forgive me, not because I cared any more about his mate now but because I could not stand the look in his eyes, and I limped up to the plush seat where the two sat. Once I was right in front of them, still at a distance so to not seem threatening and reawaken his aggressive instincts, I lifted my eyes slowly from the ground. I looked at the woman, who to me did not look at all as terrified as she sounded. But Charle was the truth-seer, not I, and I could only trust in him. This woman would become part of our group. She would be my kin sister forever more, and unless I wanted to lose my Sire to her I would have to love her.

"My deepest apologies for frightening you", I said slowly, and though my eyes were on the human female my words were for Charle. He could not see lies if one thought of it as the truth, and I was ever so sorry for frightening Charle. "I am restless and unnecessarily unpleasant to all. Your comment reminded me of my own husband."

She dabbed at her eyes and smiled shakily. I thought she looked relieved, though I could not understand why.

"What happened to him?" she wondered.

The same thing I'll do with you, I thought and I wanted to bash her skull against the floor. She would taste bad, but at least she wouldn't ask me such questions again. I asked on average two hundred questions in a day, but I would never have asked such a thing. At least, I amended, not immediately after I was almost attacked by an angry kin. Even I, who had turned out to be about as sociable as the swans I was named after, would respect another's space.

"He was human and I was _of_ _kin_", I could not help but say. "I crushed his skull between my hands and ripped his body apart."

"Sabelä!" Charle hissed at me as Re-ená absorbed my foul barb. "Leave. Now."

I bowed at my head at him and limped away. How could I have said such a thing when I wanted him to care for me again? It was not fitting of me. I knew instantly that I had made a serious mistake, but as I reached my chamber and killed the goat left for sacrifice I knew I would not go back and ask for his forgiveness. I had told the truth, hadn't I? She had wanted to know – a nosy, stupid, cruel question – and I had told her the truth.

The goat was drained of blood by the time I had managed to pull myself together again. I shredded my clothes, spreading the fabrics and hides around the room as if it was all their fault. I did not want to mess up the furniture or the beautiful gifts that littered the room, for I knew how much time had been put into this place and all the things they showered us with, but I still could not help taking my anger out at something. My everyday clothes were the least valuable of my things, for few attires could survive the stress I put them through, simply by moving too fast.

I left the goat where it landed on the ground, whole save for where my fangs had pierced its hide. Even so it was a messy kill, as all my kills were, though far cleaner than they used to be when I was a Newborn.

I inspected my mid-section carefully. There were ugly marks on my skin, like the pattern on cracked pottery that had only yet been mended on the inside. I licked my hand slowly and put it over the fine lines, watching as they knitted together almost immediately. Many small lines remained as silvery scars, but I did not have the patience at the moment to deal with the more painful, drawn-out healing that was waiting. Introducing venom from my mouth (or anyone else' venom) into a wound caused far heavier scarring than if I allowed time and blood to heal it, but it went far faster and I had never met anyone who would not appreciate scars. The more scars a person had, the more they had survived and the stronger their blood – or venom, in my case – was. In humans, it meant they could take risks and survive, whether with tools, against animals or in fights against other tribes.

The thoughts of venom and the processes of healing helped calm my mind, and I walked a few laps around my chambers. After a while a servant knocked on the door and stuck his head inside, blushing furiously once he saw my naked body. I did not care – we had never been bothered with nakedness in my tribe. We had all bathed together every summer and searched each other for lice every other night, as had all tribes and communities Charle and I had encountered so far on our journey. Perhaps this boy, a servant amongst men considered holy, was not as familiar with such things as others of his people.

It did bother me that the servant boy was so plainly attracted to me, but as he walked around the room and picked up my destroyed clothes I shielded myself behind my mental bubble. He could no longer pay my person attention, but it did nothing to stop him from blushing harder and harder the more of my clothes he picked up from the floor. I wondered what he thought I had been doing. The thought was distracting, even if it was painfully close to my original, painful line of thoughts of Þunor.

As the boy left, I could not refrain from entertaining the thought of what I would do if I was presented with an offering of the kind that Re-ená had teased me about. I was not unaware that many found my new appearance attractive if I allowed them to concentrate on me, nor the fact that their view of me as a goddess – or at least someone partly holy – would further make me an object of sexual thoughts. My bubble only kept people from focusing on my person: it did not keep people from thinking of me as a concept. Observation and attention was not the same thing as daydreams and ponderings, though they often overlapped when not hindered to do so by my shield. I wasn't sure what I would do if Re-ená let it become known that I was looking for intimate pleasure; I was sure they would find someone more or less willing to provide. If anything, the humans were still desperate to keep us happy here. The thought of seeking some kind of unjustified revenge on the city struck me hard, and only thoughts of Charle's disappointed face kept me from immediately rushing out to make reality of my twisted fantasies of blood and gore. For a moment, I wanted them to fear me. Perhaps I just wanted Re-ená to fear me.

I was not sure what to think about seeking pleasure with other men. After Þunor, I found it hard to imagine myself with another man – even Charle, whom I had been confused about for a while, had only ever been in my fantasies as the subject of light and innocent kisses even when I was very frustrated. I had been attracted to Charle, but only because he had been the only one around for me to focus such feelings on, and I had never been able to stomach the thought of going further with him. It hurt to think about my late husband, and I had to admit I had avoided doing so for almost a hundred years. Did I still love him?

No.

No, I didn't. I had to admit that, if so only to myself. I still loved the idea of loving him, and I still felt as if I was a woman who had given her pledges for life. I had lost my husband, but his claim on me remained just as mine would have remained on him had things gone according to the beliefs of my tribe. I remembered he had been considered a good match, a good man to be pledged to, but I could no longer remember his face. I froze at the sudden realization, terror surging through me. How did he look – surely I could not forget my own husband, the man I had declared mine and mine only since the day my seven-year-old self learned that most men sought partners outside their tribe.

No matter how I tried to force my memory to give me an image, all I could remember was his crushed skull and the blood and the brain that I had smeared over my hands. I could not remember the names or faces of my parents or little brothers anymore. I had killed my husband. His blood was on my hands forever and I could not remember his face.

I screamed.

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**A/N:**

**Bella's really jealous, isn't she? Renée isn't a horrible person – Bella's just perceiving Renée as such. Think about your own enemies – when they're being "nice", your skin crawls. They'll both mellow out eventually… maybe.**

**Also, I'm seriously considering future pairings here. You guys really seem to favor Jasper – but if you got to choose freely from all non-Volturi characters, who'd you want to see? Maybe I'm being a bit too narrow-minded when I consider between just Jasper or Edward… TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK, yeah? It's quite far in the future still, story-wise, but we're slowly getting there and I need to decide pretty soon so that I won't get stuck once we begin to catch up with more "modern" history. Also, I want to be able to label this story correctly for new readers.**


	6. A Ziggurat And A Wedding

**A/N: ***hides behind something* I'm really sorry. I don't know where the weeks went. I feel like a bear after hibernation, only I've been in my little stuffy den studying for exams instead of sleeping. Sleeping sounds nice, now, though.

This chapter's a bit longer than the others, hope you enjoy it.

**I did not chose (or make up) the name Lugal-kinishe-dudu. It's an actual historical name. **

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**Childe of the Swans**

_**Chapter Six: A Ziggurat and a Wedding**_

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_**3910 BC, Middle East**_

Two days after the disastrous near-attack on Re-ená, I heard King Enshakushanna ask for me many levels above in the ziggurat. I had not left my chambers for two days, though goats and once a human had been provided for me, but even from such a distance and through so many floors of stone I heard him easily enough when he asked for someone to summon me. I pulled on my most beautiful white dress and tied it around my waist with a pale rope, and then I rushed through the ziggurat at speeds that must have made me nothing but a gust of wind to the priests and servants I passed. To me, it was as if I was running lightly: I could see and hear and smell perfectly even at speeds that would have made humans dizzy. I enjoyed it, but I enjoyed jumping more. I had not jumped since I had entered the ziggurat five years earlier.

I stopped abruptly once I reached the main temple room, and the humans present jerked when I appeared with a bang of air. I found I liked the bang: it was sudden and startling, making my body coil in preparation for danger and my mind sharpen. It was to me what a splash of cold water would be for a human. I imagined it was how a leather whip would sound, if the whip was big enough. Charle gave me a reproachful glance, but I knew he would understand my need to move at speeds more natural to us. Constantly slowing down to make the humans more comfortable was both draining and uncomfortable. I wondered, distractedly, if all this acting was making my wanderlust worse than it should have been.

"The King called?" I asked and glided up to Charle's side, pausing subtly to give him time to accept my presence. He did so graciously, the humans noticing nothing of our silent communication. I was forgiven and it was all in the past.

"Ah, yes, good Goddess", King Enshakushanna said and smiled at me, and I felt as if he had no idea what I had tried to do to his daughter.

That was surprising.

Two women walked up with a table of wood and put it in front of the king, and a man who looked vaguely important directed several muscular men to carry over a large clay platter and put it on the table. Curious I leaned over the tablet before anyone could say anything that would make it impolite for me to do so. I didn't understand it all: the beautifully crafted platter, completely flat and perfectly rectangular, was covered in irregular lines from one end to the other, and here and there dots and crosses and strange depictions stood out.

"What is this?" I found myself asking, following one of the lines with a finger in the air but careful not to touch anything.

I did not want to be the one to break anything by accident just because I misjudged the strength of the clay.

"I call it a _map_", the king said and from the expression of his right hand man it was not something the king had come up with himself. "It is, in fact, a representation of the southernmost part of Sumer and Mesopotamia. These lines represent rivers and water, and these drawings are symbols for cities. We are seeing it drawn as the birds above would see it."

Despite the underlying tension between the king and his right hand man, I found myself utterly fascinated by what they had brought. The priests had not told me anything like this existed. Of course I had seen drawings on pottery and carvings in stone, and I had drawn animals in the mud with the help of sticks when I was a child – but I had never seen something like this before. Once more I was reminded why this life was worth it. As a human I would never have seen anything beyond my own tribe and the same land we traveled year after year.

The right hand man explained further how this 'map' worked, and I listened intently. Beside the king Re-ená shifted her weight impatiently, but it was easy enough to ignore her.

The king gestured happily at us. "I have decided, along with the wise priests of this Great Ziggurat, that it is only right that you are bestowed your own temple, where you shall feel less… confined – for that is not at all what a ziggurat should be! We have thought to place this new holy monument, in your honor, further south near the mouth one of the rivers of Euphrates. It will have a most spectacular view of the ocean, and you will be close to both Larsa and Ur, and it shall be placed within good distance of Uruk, too."

Re-ená looked ever so pleased, and the moment she opened her mouth I understood that she had a hand in this sudden development.

"It will be next to the river, ever taller than this ziggurat and almost twice as wide in the base! However, it shall have a hallow area in its top, holding a walled garden!" She looked like she would burst with excitement, and I had to admit that she looked rather endearing when she was worked up. "And it will have stairs in four levels at the front!"

She made a zigzagging motion with her hands, going from a point right in front of her to indicate the top of the ziggurat, then down and out to the sides to indicate two matching stairs, down and in to indicate the second pair of stairs in front of the first, and then down and out to what I supposed would be ground level. I had to admit it looked and sounded impressive: a ziggurat worthy of the gods we were not, I thought in amusement. But even in my most melodramatic moments, who was I to say no to living in a monument and temple unlike any in our history, and having it built partly in my honor?

"It does sound like quite the masterpiece", Charle said calmly, and Re-ená's face lit up. "However, I must ask: how long will this take to build? I imagine the priests in this great ziggurat we stand in now will appreciate having their holy ground back again."

While his words caused panic among the humans, who thought he was insinuating that he felt like he was unsolicited in this holy place, I saw him in a different light.

"You, too, think that we are being too strenuous occupants?" I asked in a pitch that only he would be able to hear. He nodded minutely, but no such feelings showed on his face.

"In the meantime – and this I have made sure personally!" said Re-ená and smiled widely at me. "The priests have agreed that the great door to the temple here at the top shall remain open. This way, you will be able to go out on your own and look out at the beautiful city! I find the view of Uruk is wonderful for the mind!"

"Thank you." I was sincere: whether it was out of niceness or fear, it was a very kind thing to do for us – for me – and I treasured it.

We disbanded soon after the king and the highest priests had promised that orders for the building of the ziggurat would immediately be sent. Two years passed in relative peace, but it felt as if it was just a few days. With the doors opened, we were suddenly free. The first morning after the meeting, Re-ená took us both sight-seeing, and it was fantastic. With the help of my shield no one minded me and I could stop and stare at everything I wanted whenever I wanted. Charle no doubt noticed, but either he didn't mind or he was too wrapped up in the human woman to notice, because he said nothing about it. After that, I began to explore the city on my own. I went mostly at night, but as time passed I stretched my trips longer and longer until no one thought anything about my sudden disappearances and long vacancies. For days on end I would run through the fertile lands until I found the deserts, and then I would cross sand and rock until I found rivers and grass once more. It took me barely half a day to run to the closest village, and day and night I spent exploring all of Sumer.

While traveling with Charle had been amazing for the good company and the many lessons I had learned, running free on my own was something new and incredible. It was hard to understand why I had never done so before during the past hundred years, and suddenly it seemed impossible to ever go back to how things used to be in the ziggurat. I had tasted freedom and I craved it more than I had ever craved blood. If they were to promise me an eternity of humans to feed from in exchange for my freedom, I would not hesitate to run with my freedom. But I would be back, I vowed – I'd be back and I would kill them for daring to try to control me.

The itching and crawling under my skin and the restlessness that had almost driven me mad disappeared whenever I moved. There was something decidedly _sensual_ about running in one direction for hours on end, and then suddenly – on a whim – changing direction and heading elsewhere, without a care of the old goal or a thought of what others would think. I always returned to Charle in the end, but my trips grew irregularly longer.

After two years, Charle declared Re-ená his mate for eternity; his soul mate and, as I told him, his kin mate. The ceremony of pledges was unlike anything Uruk or the world had anyone had ever seen. The whole city bathed in food and festivity, music and dance, and I held a speech: I told them this was the greatest ceremony of all of history and lore, and that never should anyone believe such a magnificent party could be held again, for it exceeded all words. They all applauded, though to be honest they were all busy staring at our skins: we had been drenched in scent oils and it made us almost too sparkly to look at directly, and we were adorned with pieces of jade and polished nuggets of gold. Our sweeping clothes were exchanged for long loincloths of the whitest cloth I had ever seen, and the humans placed a single, precious flower in Re-ená's hair. Of us, Re-ená wore the most jade and gold nuggets, most of them in her hair, around her arms or hanging down between her breasts.

It was a wedding of a god. Charle looked like a proper god at that time.

It was also a sacrifice of the king's daughter to a god, but that was not said out loud.

"I will love you forever", Charle said and grasped her tan hands in his sparling ones, in front of the entire city under the sun. "Forever and forever, until the sun no longer shines and even after that. Forevermore, you are my One and only One, for I shall have no other."

I stood beside them, the most powerful and wise of the priests next to me. It was distasteful of me, but I could not help but wonder what my own ceremony of pledges might have been like. It had not been this warm where I had lived as a human, so I must have worn more than a loincloth, and we had had no white clothes but for what pelts and feathers could make, and we had not had pieces of jade or nuggets of gold.

Re-ená was beautiful: her skin shone thanks to the oils, and her long, brown hair was raised by the gentle breeze. She was slightly shorter than I, her bare hips smaller than I had figured, there were no stretch marks on her lower belly and her breasts did not yet sag. Her youth was radiant, unmistakable, and I wondered if this glowing woman could be what Charle had always seen in the bubbly woman. I knew she would never lose that youth, now.

"I will love you forever", Re-ená said in a clear voice for all to hear, not like the softness of Charle's promise. "I am forever yours, as you are forever mine, by pledge and by love and by the will of the sun and all the gods. Forever and forever, as mates for eternity."

The priest raised his hand and placed it on the joined hands of the pledged. "By the will of the gods and the sun, by the will of this woman and by the will of this Sun-God, by the will of the holy priests of Uruk and by the will of Sabelle, Childe of White Birds and the Light of Uruk – henceforth, this woman is pledged to this Sun-God, and this Sun-God is pledged to this woman. Forevermore, until the sun brings them home, where they shall never be apart."

It was my turn to step forward to bless them. My feet stuck to the ground and I wondered if I could faint, but then my eyes focused on Charle's overjoyed expression and the smile that threatened to break Re-ená's face. I found myself stepping forward until I could rest my sparkling hand on theirs, and I repeated the priest's words one by one.

"Soul, pledged to this soul", the priest said to Re-ená and gestured gracefully at Charle. "It is your right to choose a new, pledged name for yourself. What shall your new name be?"

Re-ená smiled largely and looked Charle in the eye. "My new name shall be René-a."

I had never heard of such a tradition before, and neither had Charle who had grown up here long ago, but we had not protested on it.

The newly dubbed René-a was changed into our kin that very same night. I stayed outside of the ziggurat to try to give them some pretense of privacy when they truly became a mated pair, but there was no way to stay within distance to help without also staying within distance to hear everything. Now, it was true that I had lived in a family tent with my parents and husband, but it had been a hundred years ago – I had not realized it before, but I had forgotten that part of living with others. It wasn't as if the priests ever copulated near the holy ziggurat.

I had never before witnessed a change. It was terrifying, and I could barely imagine what Charle must have felt like when he sat in that little lone tent whose owner he had killed, listening to my screams.

"You were different", Charle said on the morning of the fourth day. We were standing around a large bed placed there for her, and she was twisting and turning in agony. "You only took three days – I have never heard of such a fast change."

"Do you think it was your venom?" I wondered as I changed the wet pad on his mate's forehead. She was burning up from the inside, and if I hadn't remembered the sensation myself I would have thought she would never make it through this. "Do you think she too will wake up early?"

Four days, Charle had told me, was the usual time it took for someone to be changed. His own sire had claimed it was five days – and I couldn't imagine how one could survive such a long time under such pain without losing one's mind – but it had been an old number, not one that was accurate anymore.

"I don't know." He shrugged.

René-a let out a particularly heartbreaking scream, and my Sire's face scrunched up in pain.

"Did you know immediately when you met her?" I asked quietly, almost afraid of asking. His reactions to the woman frightened me, though I would never admit that even to him. It made me feel weak that I feared it.

"No. At least, I don't think so." He seemed to confuse himself with his words and he shook his head. "What I felt… I thought it was simply strong attraction. That is… I did not think it any different from any physical reaction I have felt to women I have found interesting before. Now… now I cannot imagine anyone else."

I wondered if my husband would have been my mate, if I had not killed him before I had the chance to recognize him. I barely remembered it anymore, it was slipping away from me more and more, but I wanted to think that Charle's last words described how I felt when I loved Þunor. The thought made me both sick and relieved: sick, because it would mean that I had killed my mate and such a horrible thing must surely be punished in the worst way imaginable, and relieved because it meant I would never find myself so helplessly bound to another as Charle now was to René-a.

It took another day before René-a's heart stopped beating. The sound died out with one last, wet thump and I raced down into the chamber from my own just as the other female opened her eyes for the first time. Curious, I took in the startling redness of her eyes and I looked on in wonder as I realized that mine must have been as terrifyingly crazed that first year. She looked deranged.

I saw her gaze follow the dust dancing in the air and how she took note of the individual grits in the mud-bricks, and then her eyes fell on Charle. It was as though she saw the sun for the first time. It was disgusting. I wished someone would one day look at me like that.

"Charle", she exclaimed too loudly and shot up on the bed. "Charle!"

Her voice was higher than before, not as much smoother as I had expected it to be yet even sweeter than before. Her moves were blurry and jerky even to my eyes, and I growled in disbelief when she with a move of her fingers _crushed_ Charle's right hand in her palm. He let out a startled snarl and his other hand shot out to grab her by her other bicep, but the slam into the ground and intimidating, dominating growl I had expected never came.

I wanted to kill her. But Charle simply plied her fingers open and kissed her on the mouth when she tried to apologize. She deserved to be bitten and told to control herself, I thought – she needed to learn immediately and instinctively to never hurt her sire. That was the only way to assure she would never kill him in an angry craze – Newborns had to think that they had the disadvantage, whether that was the case or not.

With growing trepidation, I soon realized that René-a never learned this.

Truth to be told I had never been around a Newborn, but I was sure I had not acted the way René-a was. A year passed, yet she didn't learn to not go after the priests and the servants. She would snap at anything that moved for no reason, and in the next moment she would be ever so remorseful and swear it would never happen again. Again and again she broke her promises, yet I watched Charle smile and nod and believe her every word. She could not be around humans, even with Charle and I there to hold her back, and Charle spent most of his time entertaining her. Their newfound freedom of intimacy made it hard for me to stay in the ziggurat – I did not want to hear them share pleasure day and night. I had never been bothered by such things before Charle and René-a found each other. Perhaps it was different because they were kin.

During that first year, I spent most of my time moving across Mesopotamia. There was endless entertainment to be found. I stopped to watch humans and animals alike go about their lives, all of them completely unaware that anyone was there right next to them. I hunted endlessly, until everything seemed to be one big hunt. A few times I carried wounded humans back to their tribes and villages; other times they became my meals. My mood, my hunger and their behavior determined their fate. I did not like humans who cried. I did not know how to handle it. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that I must have cried as a human, that I must have wailed and sobbed, but I could no longer remember it and I didn't know how to make it stop.

I had thought that René-a would hate me. I fully expected her to see me as a threat like I did her, and try to convince Charle to let me leave permanently. I remembered Charle's words to me, from when I myself met others for the first time. Female kin were always more aggressive towards other females. But René-a did nothing of the sort.

"'Abell! 'Abell, honey!" she called one day when I returned from a long hunting trip, dried blood covering my person from top to toe. Had it not been dried and dirtied with desert sand, I was sure she would have tried to lick it off me. "Oh, honey, I was so worried for you!"

She babbled on and moved around me, pulling at my loose clothes and making comments about the blood and sand that stuck to my skin, hair and clothes. I wanted to growl at her to let me be, and when she touched my hair I almost lost it and shoved her away with a snarl, but Charle stood at the edge of the room and I held myself in a cage of unbreakable stone. I could never hurt his mate, I told myself. It didn't matter that she didn't understand the usual rules – it wasn't Charle's fault that he found no reason to teach his beloved mate that others of our kin did not enjoy such proximity. Was it? But he had taught me, even so. It had seemed like such an incredibly easy thing to learn that I had never entertained the thought that René-a would have a problem learning it. I wasn't even sure if it had been something Charle had taught me in words: I had seen and felt, and I had understood and learned. I had drawn the conclusion quickly that if I did not like when people moved too close, then others would not like if I did so to them. Charle had explained the 'why', and I had understood the 'when'. All I had needed to learn was appropriate distances for kin, which was greater than between humans. If you got too close to another kin without expressive invitation, you could expect to see teeth and hear snarls. Move too fast too close to another, and they would react appropriately and usually be in the right. Touch another of our kin without agreement and you were asking for a fight – it simply wasn't done with anything but hostile intentions. It was deeply instilled even in humans, to a certain degree: if one tribe member startled or threatened another, a reaction was expected and rarely condemned. I had seen many meetings between tribes turn from pleasant to kill-or-be-killed in a heartbeat because one or several members acted rudely. René-a broke all the rules and laws I had drawn up in my mind to be able to predict others, and whenever I reacted it was now my fault.

"We need a name for our group!" René-a called happily one day from her place on the plushy recliner and clapped her dainty hands, about a year and a half into her new existence.

I looked up from the seat I had claimed as permanently mine, ignoring that her scent came of it. The seat, plushy and by now perfectly worn to fit my body, smelled almost as much of me as I did myself, but the overly obvious act of claiming the piece of furniture the kin way had no effect on René-a. Whereas Charle would never touch it after I had gone to such extremes to mark it as mine and only mine, I could smell each and every time René-a had sat on it the last week. I looked at her hands and felt my lips purse as I saw her toying with one of my gifts from Larsa. It, too, carried my scent like I had bathed it in scent oils and now it would smell of her just like the seat I had – unsuccessfully – claimed as mine.

"Why?" I asked, both to her question and – though she wouldn't understand – to her disregard of my claim. Did she even have a reason?

"Because the humans need something to refer to us by, of course, dear!" René-a said and seemed completely unaware of how her wordings made my whole body tense up in anger.

I really should have learned to keep my temper in control and to expect such things from the absent-minded female. It was obvious that she tried to be good at everything Charle asked of her: all her energy went into attempts to please him. If Charle noticed how poorly I got along with the woman who wanted me to be her child, he didn't say anything. I could understand that – he saw me as his daughter, and I wondered if he didn't hope that I would grow to see his mate as a mother figure one day.

"You are the 'Kingsdaughter'. Charle is the 'Land-Walker'. I am 'Swanchild'", I reminded her as patiently as I could without looking up from the wooden puzzle on the table in front of me. It considered of sixteen pieces which was to be moved around to form different animals, and I had already solved all of them several times in the past half-day.

I refrained from reminding her that we all had titles here, too. If she thought those were enough, she would not have decided to give us all a name.

"_'Swanchild'_. A wonderful name! Absolutely marvelous!" René-a exclaimed happily and I felt drenched in cold water. "But I am no child, dear – _Swan_, what does it mean?"

"It is a water fowl, beloved", Charle said from the opposite corner of mine in the room, where he was working on a miniature, scaled version of Uruk in clay and wood. "It is a large, pristine white bird – Sabelle's people thought of swans as the kings of the birds that swim, or fly over water."

René-a had tried to help him with his model city, but not only had she crushed or otherwise destroyed most of the things she had picked up, she had also become dreadfully bored within two days. Charle had been working on his model for two and a half fortnights straight, constantly redoing parts into even more detailed pieces whenever he was done. It was a never-ending project, as houses were always being built and rebuilt in the real life city, and there were always more details to add. At the moment he was carving a piece of wood into a finger-nail-sized table covered in fruits.

"I do not want us to be called '_Swan'_, René-a. It is not a proper name – and how unrefined it would be to name oneself after a vicious bird."

Names weren't something you gave yourself – names were given by others, enemies or friends. I focused on my puzzle again, but my attention was on two priests whispering to each other many floors below. I tried to turn my argument into something that would appeal to a woman of Uruk.

"Also", I said, "it means nothing to anyone here. It is but strange sounds to them. Would you not rather we have a name which instills awe, and which they will connect to us?"

This must have pleased René-a, for she let go of the idea of naming us _Swan_. Half a year passed, and while René-a came up with many names that might have been decent enough none of them stuck and she was the only one to use them. I spent much time overseeing the building of our new ziggurat, though the humans did not know this. It went fast, I thought, though I had nothing so grand to compare with.

Then news reached us that King Enshakushanna had succumbed to an infected cut.

René-a was inconsolable for a year, and I refused to go near the ziggurat in that time in fear of having to listen to my Sire and his mate go at it like rabbits in spring. Almost four hundred days after the news reached Uruk, a man in elegant robes arrived with a convoy of two hundred men clad in identical clothes. It was incredible to see them walking together; one unit, powerful and terrifying in their numbers. Before Uruk, it would have been the biggest human group I had ever seen.

King Enshakushanna's favorite son, Lugal-kinishe-dudu was the man leading them. Shortly after arriving to Uruk and declaring himself the new king, he was carried up the steps of our ziggurat. Charle, René-a and I stood outside the temple doors as he arrived to the summit. Charle stood in the middle and a step in front of us, and we were clad in the finest loincloths of the city for the occasion. Our skins sparkled in the bright, southern sun, and the dry ocean wind ripped at my hair. I had not had such little clothes on outside in a few years, as it made my shield that important inch less effective.

The king hailed us and we welcomed him into our temple, where a feast had been prepared for him. King Lugal-kinishe-dudu looked much like René-a and it was easy to tell that they were of the same father; his skin was tan and his eyes brown to match his curly hair. However, he had little of his father's ambitions, even if he adored his sister as much as any other I had watched interact with her.

During the feast I had used my shield to make myself non-existent to all but Charle, but by the end I had let it go periodically in boredom. It was during one of these moments that the king leaned forward and gestured to the large doors. I accompanied him out on the ziggurat summit outside the temple building. The evening air was cool, but I was not bothered by it. It felt familiar, more like it had at home, and the twenty-six year old king shuddered as a gust of wind ripped at his green robes. I kept my shield at its minimum, allowing him to focus on me if he wished even if his human mind still found it hard. It was the best I could do.

"Is Goddess Sabelle aware that my father, King Enshakushanna, wished for me to ask for the Goddess' pledges?"

I looked at him closely. He looked nervous, the skin under his small eyes twitching and the sharp protrusion on his throat bobbing as he swallowed.

"I was not aware", I admitted. "Charle found his mate in His Majesty's sister René-a, but it was by chance. I have lost my mate."

The words slipped out without my meaning, conforming into something he would understand and keeping to the volume and speed he had spoken.

The moment I had said it, I knew it was how I felt. I had had a mate, and I had killed him. I could not imagine that my husband would not have been my mate, and I had never heard Charle mention that there was more than the One for us. If there was, it would no longer be the One, I reasoned, and then Charle would be wrong. Charle was very rarely wrong.

King Lugal-kinishe-dudu breathed out in what I guessed was relief, and I realized that he had been worried that I would demand he uphold his father's wishes. It seemed hilarious, but if I put myself in his sandals I was sure I would have worried about the same thing.

"I have ordered the building of the ziggurat in your honor to be continued as planned." The king swallowed and looked out at the sleeping city bathing in moonlight. "I am king now, but I will not dishonor neither you nor my father."

I nodded and gave him a small smile that I only then realized had been vacant from socialization with others for a decade.

A new epoch had begun, I thought.


	7. Of Distant Lands

_**A/N: Here it is. I don't know why this was so hard to put together… it just never turned out like it was supposed to.**_

_**I don't know. Part of me wants to explore this part of the story for a long, long time – another part of me just wants to get to modern times already.**_

_**Word count is just over 7600 this time, practically its own arc. With this over, we've entered the time period of official Swan Coven sovereign.**_

_**.**_

* * *

**Childe of Swans**

_**Chapter Seven: Of Distant Lands**_

* * *

_**3846 BC, Middle East**_

Sixty years passed in relative peace for the three of our kin that resided in the ziggurat in Uruk, but the same could not be said for the rest of Mesopotamia. The king of the Sumerian city of Lagash, east of Uruk, had led a long and bloody campaign against King Lugal-kinishe-dudu, quickly seizing control over all of Sumer. The new king of Sumer was not as peaceful as the kings before him.

Despite the shift of power, our planned ziggurat was finished and we relocated along with twelve priests of varying importance, and eighty-seven servants. The ziggurat rose from the sand dunes like a mythical beasts, and the three turning flights of stairs at the front made for a most impressive sight. The top was not flat and crowned by a temple, as other ziggurats were – instead it was as René-a had wanted. The summit had been made hallow; the leaning walls continued up beyond the flat summit to form a decorative fence of mud-bricks around it, and we could easily take a jump up and get a wondrous view of the desert, the blue ocean and the nearby cities. The walled area had been turned into a garden that was sure to attract attention from far-away lands; flowers unlike any I had ever imagined had been brought to our new ziggurat in our honor.

"It is beautiful", I praised the humans around us as the ziggurat was celebrated upon its completion. And it was beautiful. It could be seen from the river, from the cities of Larsa and Ur – even all the way from the ocean.

"That it is", Charle agreed with me as he held René-a in his arms.

"And it is ours!" René-a said and smiled happily, teeth flashing. She had an unusual lot of teeth left for a twenty-something woman, missing only two teeth, and the change had turned them pearl white. "It shall need a name!"

I walked out to the edge of the ziggurat and rested my forearms on the top of the mud-brick wall. The view was breathtaking, and the scent of colorful flowers whirled in my nose along with the desert and ocean winds.

"Charle!" I called and threw a glance at him over my shoulder. "Come, look!"

He smiled and ran up next to me, rustling leaves and flowers as he passed through the garden.

"The humans really have outdone themselves, have they not?" Charle said and smiled at me as René-a appeared next to him. They snaked their arms around each other and together the three of us stared out at the world.

I hummed in agreement and Charle drew his arm around my shoulders like I imagined my father might have done once upon a time.

* * *

The cities of Larsa and Ur provided the humans that lived in the smaller building complexes around our ziggurat with food and provisions and, occasionally, their criminals became our sacrifices. The new king did not favor us as his gods, but he feared us and while he himself never met us he made sure we were provided with the luxuries he thought we would want. Most we had no need for, and together Charle and I would sometimes sneak into Larsa and Ur and place our gifts of fabrics, foods and precious items in the houses of the poor. It made them happy and thus it made Charle happy, and I found that it brought a smile to my face if I stayed back to watch the humans discover our gifts. They said Larsa and Ur were blessed, and though both Charle and I knew better we willingly went with it.

Sumer was ours: it belonged to us the same way it belonged to the king of the time. The humans in Sumer were ours, too, as were the animals, and I agreed with Charle and René-a that no other kin was allowed to hunt what was ours. Charle had explained _territory _to us, of course, not that he had really needed, but we had never heard on others that had taken on such a grand expanse of land before as we had. All of Sumer was our territory, under our protection, and there was no one but us to make sure that we were the only Sun-Gods to plague the humans there.

I was running along our border when I heard screams. First human screams: women and men; then the screeches of a kin depraved of a prey. My venom burned and I barely noticed the sand had moved under my feet until I was within sight of the little nomadic tribe. There were a rough twenty humans, and a kin – short but with a bulky frame, an exotic slant to his face I had not seen before – slaughtering them like a fox in the rabbits' den.

I barely noticed I roared but the kin whirled to face me all the same, his teeth bared. We growled, black eyes to black eyes, and I took the opportunity to look at his features while the humans scattered around us. There was only desert around us: nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

"This is claimed land", I said as clearly as I could. "You may not hunt here."

I did not like massacres, and I did not like battlefields. I hated seeing corpses treated without the respect they deserved, the way I had made my first kill and none since. It didn't matter whether it was a human or an animal, the dead deserved to be treated with respect. But this male kin was ripping the humans apart with his hands, barely stopping to drink before he went on; like a wolf he seemed to need quiet and silence, with no panicking herd to disturb him once he leaned down to enjoy the bounty of his hunt. I decided I did not like this male.

He growled at me, his eyes darting and I wondered if he could not understand me, or if he was too deep into his blood thirst to hear my words for what they were.

"Leave, kin", I snarled and my fangs slipped out. His head jerked back – had he never seen fangs, then? – and his growl rumbled from deep within him as if there was a monster about to claw its way out of him.

I hadn't fought kin alone like this before, and never in defense of my territory. As he circled me, I thought of turning back and running to the ziggurat, calling Charle to my aid. He'd know what to do, perhaps even how to calm this kin down.

I tried again, in another dialect of Sumerian.

The male kin snarled loudly, and then he was over me – large and heavy, a force that made me tumble like a leaf in the breeze. I tried to get to my feet, fangs snapping for purchase in his skin, but he was always out of reach. He was too fast, too strong, and I couldn't get a hold of him.

My shield snapped up, glowing like the full moon to my eyes alone, and suddenly he was wrestling with thin air. I stumbled away from him. He got to his feet, shook his head with a snarl and his black eyes darted around madly. He knew logically that I should be there, that he was fighting someone, but he couldn't keep his eyes locked on me. Actually, I thought with wide eyes, he didn't seem able to find me even though my shield could not break his concentration on me. The world righted itself again and I spared a moment to marvel at how much my gift had grown that I no longer needed for their minds to be distracted with other things.

I leaped at him, crashing into his back and rolling with him across the sand, my legs locked around him as my hands found his throat. He bucked and roared and it was hard to think of him as a human, causing such inhumane sounds of fury. My fangs sunk into his hard shoulders – I had never done that before, my dazed mind provided – and venom ran between us, his and mine. He screamed and his hands found my legs and started to pull. My skin began to crack and pain bloomed in my legs.

"_Can we die?"_

"_Only by the hands of another of our kind. One needs to rip us apart into small pieces and burn us on a pyre for us to stay dead."_

The conversation came back to me like voices in my ear and I dug my dirty nails into the male's throat until I had pierced his skin and his stone flesh was against my fingers like nothing I had ever felt before and then I _tugged_. I snapped the head to the side like one would wring a little bird's or rabbit's head, and pulled upwards with all my might in the same movement so that his neck broke. There was no other word for it but "broke", because like a shattered clay tray he came apart. My pull had been too strong, overreaching because I couldn't afford to fail, and his head flew through the air in a graceless arch. His body tumbled to the ground, still. Some distance away, the stone head hit the sound.

It didn't feel anything like a kill I had done before. It wasn't like killing to feed or clothe oneself. It felt like a cold, bad kill. It felt like-

… perhaps like how killing a human had felt, when I too was human. It was unnerving, not just because it made my insides churn but because it was a punch to the face in that I no longer felt strange about killing humans.

Distantly I heard the humans slow down until they were no longer running in panic, though they did not yet dare think of me as a savior. I paid them no mind. There were no bitten humans alive to take care of. However, I knew I could not leave the body here to pull itself together and go after the humans in Sumer again.

"I'll bring you back to Charle", I murmured to the motionless head as I picked it up and placed it in my satchel. The satchel was not quite big enough, and the top of his black-haired head was bare for all to see.

This one did not deserve my respect.

I flung his body over my shoulder and gestured for the humans that they could safely tend to their tribesmen's bodies and the broken stuff, but they did not dare come close enough to comfortably speak. It was not something one could take personal.

But when I came back to the ziggurat and the kin – a Newborn, we found out – had pulled himself together and regained his wits, it became clear that he was neither willing nor able to talk to us. He did not speak our language, not even understand it. We fed him animal blood, thinking that perhaps it would calm the Newborn down to not have humans near, but it did not work. The only thing we got out of him was that he hated us with passion I had never seen before: a kind of hate that made him lash out at us at the slightest chance, and even without arms or legs (René-a could not look when the limbs were removed, and I admit I was not comfortable with it either) he tried to kill us.

We pulled him apart and burned him. That was the first kin I ever watched die, even if it was not by my own hand.

Even so-called Sun-Gods died.

* * *

A few days later a man came to the ziggurat to showcase burnt clay, on the smooth surface of which he had drawn lines and little dots. He taught me that the lines and dots, made by pressing reed stalks against the soft clay, represented sounds and concepts, and that through these little drawings he could convey messages to others who understood it far, far away without revealing the message to the messengers. Another day, men galloped into Mesopotamia on the backs of horses. I bought two from them, despite the fact that none of the creatures would allow me near, and I paid such a good price that they swore they would return to us with more horses. Yet another day, sailors brought with them to Larsa round blocks of wood on pokes, and they called this new invention _wheels. _They stuck the wooden _wheels _and the pokes under a travois, and called it a _cart. _

However, while many grand inventions had been made, it was also a period of unrest among our kin. The wealth of Sumer brought with it something new and unknown. It was as if all of our kin suddenly had an urge to go there, and we had been forced to defend our home lands many times through force. The Newborns who came were unwilling to stop and talk, as much as it would have helped when they did not speak Sumerian; they were solely interested in slaughtering the villages right under our noses. It took us some time to notice that there was a pattern, but once we did it could not be clearer: they all came from the far away east, being slightly shorter than the average Sumerian and with the same unfamiliar features of the first male kin I had beheaded.

It was only after ten years of hunting insolent Newborns that we understood the scale of the situation.

"Sabelä!" Charle called suddenly one afternoon as he rushed down the stairs and into the spacious main room of our ziggurat. "Sabelä!"

I shoved down all glee and urge to gloat that rose within me when René-a frowned in confusion opposite the game board we had been entertaining ourselves with, and I stood to greet my Sire back home.

"Sire?" I asked when he stopped in front of us.

A wave of his hand had all the mingling human servants tripping over themselves to get out fast enough. Charle reminded me of a slighted peacock; his chest blown out, his shoulders squared and his jaw set while his eyes were wide open and his thoughts seemed scattered to the wind.

"Beloved?" René-a wondered in worry and too rose from her seat at the game board.

"The Newborns! They hail from a river called Yellow River – and they all run from 'Banpo' and the surrounding villages, further away than any human here has traveled. So the Newborn I caught said."

I tilted my head and felt a wave of excitement rush through me while René-a looked disturbed. This was new to us. We had never known that there was such lands in the east, though we had truthfully never declared the world to be small. I wondered how it would be there – if Uruk was impossible for me to grasp until I went there and saw it with my own eyes, how would this unknown world seem?

"Someone is turning Newborns and sending them here?" I wondered. "On purpose?"

It felt strange, a novelty that tasted bad on the tongue. Charle had told me that our kin would often fight, group against group, but this was something different. There was no lack of territory in the world – there had been years when Charle and I had run and run without meeting or smelling any kin at all. But it felt as if it was our territory that was attacked, not just us. They slaughtered the villages and little farming communities, the nomadic tribes that traveled between lands much like my family had – moving ever deeper into our territory. They did not run with the sole purpose of hunting us down. This reminded of the new, to me foreign way of human warfare: men being sent in waves to raid and destroy, before the king and his armies swooped in and conquered.

For once René-a seemed to follow my line of thoughts, and she gasped. "No! No! They cannot take this – this is our land! They cannot come here and think they can take it from us!"

I refrained from telling her that her forefathers had done the same to Sumer and that she had watched her brother be overthrown without doing anything about it. From the look Charle sent me, he didn't want me to say anything either.

"Did the Newborn say who sent them?" I asked my Sire and sat down on my seat again.

Charle shook his head. "He did not speak any dialect of Sumerian, but I found two human sailors to translate for me, in steps, even if only a few words. They are sent by the 'Sisters of Yangshao', and their objective is to take us down, as far as I can understand."

"Why?" René-a cried. "Why would they do that?"

"We have garnered much power here, beloved", Charle said, and I agreed with his reasoning by nodding. "It was inevitable, I think, that it'd raise the attention of others who live like us."

"You think they are hailed as Gods, too?" I wondered, because it would certainly change (and also explain) a lot.

Gods had incredible power, I knew of course. Gods could, if they could speak for themselves the way Charle could, get almost anything done at the wave of their hand – not all would hold back on their wishes and demands. If these people were held as powerful and righteous Gods – not ones to be held prisoners – they would have all the sacrifices and resources necessary to launch a large military campaign against us.

And we were only three kin with little to no experience on the battle field. Before the Newborns began pouring in I had never killed another of our kind, and even now I had only fought a few at a time. Killing kin was nothing like killing humans. Killing humans was an unfortunate backside of life when I myself was human, and now a necessity to survive. But killing kin was hard, and it made me feel strange – kin were not prey in any way, and I did not need to fight for food and land the same way I had to as a human. It was easier to move away now. What we might be facing… there could be uncountable groups of kin heading for Mesopotamia.

"Yes." The thought of others hailed as Gods seemed to make Charle equally uneasy as it made me.

"They have to move three and three or less, right?" I looked at the game board and to René-a's anger I plucked all the pieces up and started to arrange them three and three like I imagined the forces to arrive. "That means they can keep a steady stream coming at us, as long as they can keep them from losing the wished speed and therefore running into each other. Newborns wouldn't be able to keep from fighting each other, and there cannot be an older kin with all groups – there cannot possibly be that many to spare. That means most would still have to go alone. Three against one is enough for us to stand a good chance, even if they keep coming."

"We cannot ignore the possibility that they can move bigger groups, Sabelä", Charle disagreed. "I have already heard of groups of five – if so many Newborns can be kept from fighting each other during such a long journey, then it is not farfetched to think they could bring large hoards."

The concept terrified me. I could barely stand being in a group of three, and then only because Charle held us together. I had not yet met another of our kin I could stand the way I could my Sire. The thought of being in a group of five or more… it was incredible and it was petrifying.

"What do we do now?" I wondered.

Charle swallowed and it looked like he would lift the prospect of relocating ourselves, of moving away from this life of excess and power. I looked at him expectantly, and I wondered if I truly was the only one who wanted to travel more again.

"We can't leave!" René-a cried angrily and smashed her hand against the board. It broke and the thirty-four pieces flew in all directions. "No, I won't stand for it. We can fight – let them come! I won't cower like a lowly servant because someone does not want us to keep our home!"

"It isn't that simp-" I began, but she shrieked angrily and hissed at me.

My body tensed and I was ready to launch myself at the woman when Charle growled warningly at us. He was used to our squabbles and no longer reacted as violently, though he would surely throw me down against the ground if I ever again tried to hurt his mate.

"I'm sorry, honey", René-a said as she calmed down. "You know I try to be as good at keeping my temper as you both are."

"I know", I said and Charle finally stopped staring at me.

"We will stay", Charle declared, as if it had been a mutually agreed decision. "But we will send our own messengers."

Charle was the only one of us who had bit another before without killing them, and so it was not an argued decision that he should be the one to turn our first messenger. That afternoon, we gathered the slaves of the ziggurat and the surrounding temple complex in the area in front of the imposing ziggurat stairs. From there, the word was spread that we were looking for someone to become a lesser god of our group, for we were in need of someone with swift feet and the ability to speak for us elsewhere. It was a great honor, René-a said, and the humans believed her. I understood why – perhaps, if I had seen Sun-Gods and not the stars as the gods to be trusted in, I would have been equally willing to serve. As it was, humans flocked to us. They shouted and pleaded, explaining why they of all who came were the most suited for our needs.

In the end, a tall and broad-shouldered young man of twenty years of age was chosen. He did not have a family, though I found it hard to understand why because he was a well-built man and surely young women must show interest in him even though he was not of great social standing in Uruk. Charle bit him in the evening, and three and a half day later he awoke as a Newborn.

"You are a new man now, my Childe", Charle said ceremonially as the Newborn got to his feet. "Welcome."

The Newborn was much like René-a – unstable, easily angered and startled by every scent that came his way. However, he did not have any problems understanding the hierarchy of our group, and I assumed it was both because of his human life and perhaps also because he had entered this life with the knowledge that he was lesser in standing to us.

We did not need a Newborn coup from inside our own ziggurat.

The Newborn was sent off two months after his change, with the message for the enemy to cease their attacks. We waited three months, but the Newborns did not stop coming and we could no longer keep the area safe on our own.

"We need more hands and more eyes", Charle declared, and this time I was the one to choose the future Newborn.

I chose a muscular young man, not particularly pretty to look at but from what I could decipher both intelligent and knowledgeable. I ripped his throat out by mistake. Charle bit another, who woke up at the fourth-day mark and turned out to be quite sane for a Newborn. René-a chose the next one for Charle to turn, a slight young woman with a pretty face. She survived the change, but her blood thirst was unlike anything we had seen. We sent her on a suicide mission as bait for a Newborn group of five that had been terrorizing the east of Sumer. The next time I was to bite someone, Charle brought the man to me.

He gestured to the man, who stared at me with trust in his brown eyes as he knelt on the floor of the main room. A shudder went down my back, as if I had seen eyes like his before, and I wondered what that person might have meant to me. I smiled at him, as prettily as I could, and his eyes turned vacant like when Charle or René-a smiled at someone. I leaned down to his face and blew air in his face, watching as he became lost to the world and disappeared into a smiling day-dream. When he was completely lost I continued to lean further towards him, pressed my nose against his throat and breathed in deeply.

The man did not smell unusually good, and I did not feel my thirst rise uncomfortably in my throat like during my last attempt. I smiled, pleased, and nodded to Charle. This man was better, not as tempting as the other one who I had killed.

I opened my mouth, my fangs unsheathing from my gums with a low, wet sound only Charle, René-a and I recognized, and I put them against the man's pulse point. My fangs pierced his skin like there was nothing there but air, and blood flowed into my mouth. It tasted heavenly like always, curling my toes and sending shudders down my back as a moan rumbled up my throat. I sucked hard, drew in as much blood as I possibly could and swallowed heavily.

Strong hands ripped me away from my prey and I roared in anger, leaping back and landing in a crouch ready to defend myself. My eyes landed on Charle, crouched next to the man I had been supposed to change, and my silent heart sunk.

"Dead", Charle sighed.

We left in silence and let the human servants take care of the body.

* * *

I had thought myself controlled for one of our kin. I could go for a long time between feedings, and I could stand the enemy Newborns' bloodbaths without losing my control and licking the ground (and I would have chortled loud and hard at René-a had not Charle arrived right then). But I had never before tried to stop while drinking blood. I had thought that it couldn't be too hard – Charle had done it, so many others had done it – especially if some idiots actually managed to create Newborns without meaning to. But the three first times I tried to turn someone, I killed them by mistake.

My fourth attempt went better. I chose the man myself from the hoard of willing, picked him out like cattle on a market and bit him. My lips closed around his throat, my tongue lapping at the skin between the puncture holes my fangs made and licking the excess blood from his skin as I sucked on the puncture holes. The taste was heavenly as always, but this time something was different. My eyes flew open. For the first time, I managed to wrench myself away. My venom coursed through his veins, and I felt an almost perverse pleasure from the scent of my venom in his blood. He screamed and trashed, but his eyes were open and he looked at me through the haze of the pain. He wanted this. He would make a good Childe, I was sure.

His heart stopped beating after six days, and he never woke up. Like many, he did not live through the change. My fifth attempt lost too much blood, because while I managed to release him before accidentally killing him he did not survive more than a few hours, not nearly long enough for my venom to save him.

During my first five failed attempts, I helped the rest of the group with the Newborns. After some time, when some had left and I had learned to turn new kin to replace the messengers, there were five in total in the ziggurat: two females and three males. All of them were easily angered, and we had to keep them separate from any human activity to prevent bloodbaths. Before we realized what had happened, the two females had killed each other and one of the males was ripped apart. It was not easy to keep Newborns.

And I had thought it was troublesome enough with just René-a around.

The Newborns did not particularly like me, and the feeling was mutual. They did not listen to me, and I didn't care much about their petty fights and arguments. I had been there, and I was not interested in getting involved in fights over who got to walk up the stairs first or who could smile to whom. We put the destroyed Newborns together again, but the animosity was too great for us to handle. If left alone, they would have killed each other all over. Instead we split them up. One of the females came with me, along with one of the males whom I had bit, while the others were divided between Charle and René-a. Then we ran in different directions, with the plan to be back at the ziggurat in a fortnight.

Of the two Newborns I took with me, only the male survived. His name was Narme, and he stood out among the people of Sumer with his skin the color of the night sky. He was very handsome and had traveled very far to see us, and Charle had immediately taken a liking to the man. I liked him too, as far as Newborns and kin went. He was quiet and thoughtful, but even so not someone I would ever feel attracted to. Perhaps it was in the way he and all the others moved, like all other humans around us… like a follower, like a servant. Technically, he was our servant just like all the other Newborns. Still, it felt strange to lead anyone. I preferred to point and let people work it out for themselves without getting in the way. It was easier and quieter that way.

But fighting wasn't easy or quiet. It was half-digested blood and venom, hard flesh and blurs of color as we clashed. Often we met the enemy loners or groups outside slaughtered villages. I picked up another woman, who I turned – a widow this time, with sharp eyes and a forehead that was always set in a frown. Her name was Lilith, and the moment she woke up I set her on the enemy Newborns. She survived that skirmish with a taste for violence, and that love of fighting could not be beaten out of her.

"I think I have found a way to make our Newborns more dangerous", I told Charle and René-a when we met up at the ziggurat. Next to me, Narme shifted his weight and growled at Lilith when she came to close.

"How?" René-a asked, still covered in half-digested blood and venom from the kin she had slayed. There were no one with her – none of her Newborns had survived, and she could not turn others on her own.

Charle looked better off than René-a and I, but I had expected as much. He had only had one male Newborn with him, and the man still stood tall behind him.

"By sending them into the fights immediately", I said. "Lilith used her own fear and confusion when she woke up to our advantage, by direction those emotions at a threat. She loathes anyone who smells of our enemy's venom line."

"If we can train the Newborns… if we can instill hatred in them and aim it at the enemy…" Charle looked thoughtful.

"Then they will be able to move on their own, won't they?" René-a looked relieved and she let out a big breath. I had never seen her hurt before, and the first thing Charle had done when we had met up was to take her in his arms and lick her wounds until they closed. She was still shaking. "Like scavenger dogs in a pack… like in the pack fights. They don't harm their own: they're too focused on hunting down the enemy dogs."

It was a precarious strategy, I knew. If Lilith did not encounter enemies often enough, she turned on Narme and I. We would need to keep all Newborns firmly focused on the enemy, the fight and the hunt. A moment of boredom or slacking direction and they would kill each other.

Charle decided that someone needed to stay in the ziggurat and keep things going smoothly there, and when he said René-a would be the one to do it no one protested. No one was stupid enough to protest against that. Charle wanted to protect his mate but could not risk fighting alongside the scatterbrained woman out of fear of becoming too tied to her side, and René-a did not want to be on the battlefield if anything could be done about it.

Narme was by then mentally stable enough that I sent him off with one of the new Newborns Charle turned. With Narme as the leader of one pair, there were still three groups moving across Sumer and fighting the kin from the Yellow River.

It was strange to kill kin – not just hard, but _unsettling_. Ripping them apart did not make me uneasy. I had ripped apart kin before: even as little more than a Newborn myself I had ripped off limbs from others. The wrestling, the snapping jaws and the teeth and nails that tore off chunks of flesh were not new to me. It was the burning that unsettled me. My people had not burned our dead, like humans here in Sumer did. We had buried them, given them back to our Mother, the Earth. There was no option of burying the Newborns: they would just reattach underneath the earth and crawl up within a few decades. Pyres needed wood and some way of lighting a fire, and whether we hit rocks against each other or rubbed wood on wood there was always a great danger involved. All ways of lighting a pyre made it necessary to work up a small, jumping spark or glowing ember into a small fire stick by stick. For creatures who could only truly die by fire it was almost as dangerous as the fighting itself. Our venom was so easily ignited that no open wounds, healing scars or other orifices such as mouths or eyes were allowed to be kept near the flames.

The initial years, I didn't think much while I fought. It was all instinct, a haze of red. It was not unusual that we attacked our own in the chaos. I was not born a leader like Charle, and while I could discuss theories and strategies until humans were bored to tears (or fell asleep) I rarely followed the plans and strategies I set up. The instincts took over the moment I spotted the enemy, and I only returned to my senses once the battle was over.

I wasn't sure how long it continued like that. It was a long time, at least. My group constantly changed, for all who survived long enough were given their own Newborns to lead. Not that there were many who survived their first few months – there was Narme and Charle's first fighter, Lilith and then three more that were turned later. We fought, retreated deeper into our territory to regroup and then headed out again to protect the borders.

Then Charle called us all back, and we gathered not far from the ziggurat to listen to him. He was drenched in half-digested blood and venom and covered with scars, but his pristine clothes were freshly brought by servants and made him seem unreal as he paced in front of us. The sun made us all glitter under the dirt and grime of war, and I wondered if this was worth it. We were dirtying ourselves, and draining almost as many humans as the enemy just to keep our Newborns on their feet long enough to fight for us. I thought we looked little better than humans come back from fruitless wars – it had been years, and we had still not made any big progress.

"I have troublesome news", Charle told us and stopped pacing, his eyes locking on mine with a heaviness that made me far more uneasy than his words had. "There is a war host on its way towards us, made up of Newborns from our enemies."

A rustle went through our army of ten Newborns and the three other leaders, but no one dared speak. Even René-a

"Three groups of fifteen each are on their way towards us, running side-by-side three hundred stone-throws from each other."

A cold shrill went through me. Forty-five kin were far too many for us to ever win against, there was simply no way. I glanced up at Charle, urging him with my eyes that this was the time when we finally turn tail and get out of Sumer. It would not be hard to send our Newborns onwards and let them fight to the best of their ability while we made ourselves scarce.

I was not ready to die for Sumer. It was not hard for me to admit this, I thought as I stared at Charle. While Sumer was my home now it was not my homeland, and I did not feel any ties to it beyond familiarity and material possessiveness. I could not help but think that territory was not worth dying for, not when there were endless expanses of land in all directions of the wind. If we could no longer face a threat, then we should not linger.

"We will draw them all into the valley by Nippur, and there we will arrange an ambush", Charle declared and I felt as if he had punched me in the stomach.

At the same time, it came as little surprise. Charle would not give up while René-a still waited for him in the ziggurat. Disgust welled up inside me. René-a wanted the ziggurat, wanted Sumer, perhaps almost as much as she wanted Charle. And Charle wanted René-a to be happy.

We created three Newborns and sent them with Narme as bait to lure the three enemy groups to the valley of our ambush. Come my two-hundredth Childe I found myself capable of letting go of my victims with ease I never thought possible. By keeping the Newborns in small groups separate from each other in ambush locations around the valley we managed to keep the twenty-five Newborns from killing each other.

_And we crushed the attackers, like a wolf pack descending on a kicking moose._

* * *

_**3806 BC, Middle East**_

We lost most of our Newborns, even if we did win in the end – just like how wolves taking down moose often lost members of the pack. But we survived, and we learned a valuable lesson. From then on, we ripped out the throats of most of our Newborns so that they would never again be able to ruin an ambush with their snarls and roars. We also learned how to keep larger groups of Newborns at once without having them kill each other.

Forty years after we learned of them, the Sisters of Yangshao marched on our ziggurat with an army of more than two hundred. Later, Charle would say that the only reason we survived that day was because of me. But I knew the only reason we survived that battle and following confrontation was because of my bubble.

My shield could not protect our entire army, no matter how I tried to stretch it out. There were sixty-four of us and two-hundred and thirty-four of them – and I could not push my shield more than ten feet in all directions. When the enemy engaged us, they would move inside the bubble because it did not wrap around the skin of my followers in the way it did for me and it could not follow their movements. Our sixty-four Newborns were well fed and trained harshly to kill with no excess wrestling or biting. We had even cut out their voice boxes during their transformations, so that they would not be able to roar or otherwise reveal to the enemy what they were doing. Without the ability to hiss and say stupid things to each other, they fought less. Our precautions and preparations should not have been enough, and they weren't. When our Newborns were all killed off save for five of our oldest, one hundred of the enemy still remained. We should by all accounts have been slayed and that should have been the end of the Kin-Slaying.

The air danced around us in the heat, but it could not fool our eyes. I could see everything too clearly, every dismembered body burned into my memory forever. My body was sticky with blood and venom, and the desert sand stuck to it until the yellowish sand looked like a second skin. The sand and foreign venom got into my wounds, stinging until I thought I would cry.

I screamed at Charle to keep his back against mine, and he ordered the others to stand within two feet of me. Battle instincts raved in us, willing us to turn on each other as we came too close to one another and screeching at us to kill when our bodies brushed together. We ignored it in favor of the larger threat, but only because survival instincts kicked in. There was nothing intelligent or tactical in our movements or reasoning's, only pure and insane survival. At least, so it was on my side of things. I stretched my shield three feet out from my body and powered it up further than I ever had, finding power in my terror and mortal fear. That was the second time in my existence I truly feared death. And then the enemies flooded us, unaware of our presence, and we tore into them like a whirlwind. It was a massacre; more confusing than even the battle between two visually unseparated armies. There were enemies everywhere, some coming close enough to be aware of us and others too far away yet so crazed that they simply slammed through the crowds. There were no lines, and we saw no signs of any leaders directing the stampede.

When it was over, we had lost all the Newborns and we were three against three. Even Narme was gone, and I felt brief stab of sorrow before the situation force me to focus. Even so I fell to my knees, my wounds stinging like I had been thrown into an acid pond, and my shield flickered out to a low bluish sheen around me. It snapped back against my skin, leaving the other two unprotected. They didn't need it.

"Stand back, invaders!" René-a called with a strong voice and stepped forwards even though her frame was trembling. "You have lost and we have won! Leave this land, now!"

The three Sisters of Yangshao were not alike – one was tall, the third very short and the second one had very little hair on her head. They were dressed in strangely made materials that I had not seen before, though they seemed to be of weaved clothed of some kind, and their eyes were all narrow in kinship. Their eyes were filled with hate and anger, enough that I could easily imagine feeling their emotions in the air between us.

Charle tried to reason. I did not listen to him, staring intently at the three sisters. They were younger than us – than all three of us – from what I could smell of their venom, but they were no less physically or mentally powerful. Their shoulders were squared, their muscles coiled and tense. My body ached, but I prepared myself for one last move.

Without further warning, the Sisters of Yanghao leaped to kill us and blue fire flowed from one of the sister's hands. I was vaguely aware that my shield kicked up around me and that I rushed them with my last bit of strength.

I lost my head, but two of the sisters died at my hands before I was taken down by the third.

When Charle put me together again, allowing my wound to heal itself through time without using his own venom, we were safe in our ziggurat.

"Well done, Childe", Charle murmured and took me in his arms with a large, relieved smile. I wondered if he had thought I might not wake up again, for his demeanor was unusually intense around both René-a and I for a long time.

René-a danced around for years, singing and laughing. Through human witnesses and escaped Newborns, word traveled to our kin all over the world.

The Sisters of Yanghao had been the queens of all of their kin in the east. With them gone and their influence over the eastern world lost, René-a had asked Charle to send out Newborns with news of our miraculous victory – decided and enforced by the Gods above, she had made them say. Thus we also gained control over the eastern world, and the fearful respect of our kin in the north from where I hailed. We thought our problems over forever.

* * *

_**...**_

_(Heavy on the coven history, no dramatic arc conclusion, no new canon character introductions.)_

_**...**_

_**(So happy this part is over…)**_

**Thank you for reading**


	8. Terror

**A/N: **Thank you all for your awesome reviews! I love hearing what you think!

* * *

**Childe of the Swans**

_**Chapter Eight: Terror**_

* * *

_**3803 BC, Egypt**_

Shortly after our victory against the Sisters of Yanghao, words reached us of terrors in the southwest, beyond the great river Nile far away. They were merely rumors between humans, but with newfound respect for our kin I set out on my own to find out the truth. Charle and René-a stayed at the ziggurat, though I was sure I did not imagine the longing in my Sire's eyes as I leaped of the wall high up in the air, landed in a cloud of sand and tore off through the sand dunes in my way.

I found myself in a small village at the Nile river bank when I first encountered the left-behinds of the Terrors. A kin named Bahn stood to my left, pointing into the hut where women lay on the floor in pieces of blood-less meat. Bahn was young, perhaps fifteen years of age when he was turned, and something about his eyes made my neck hair stand on end.

"The Terrors do not cover their tracks at all", Bahn told me in the language he had taught me. "They do not understand."

I nodded that I heard what he was saying. He took a step too close and my upper lip stretched up and out, my fangs lowering with wet sounds. I let out a warning grumble and he leaped two feet away, his red eyes wide in fear.

"Be polite", I chided him and showed him how my fangs receded into my gums. "Other kill you if you come too close."

Bahn nodded hastily and apologized, and I let the matter go. The Kin-Slaying, which had officially been declared over the moment I woke up again, had left me more easily startled by unpredictable behavior than I had been even before. Perhaps beheading did that to us. Before, I had wrestled and fought kin in angry fits if they angered me or made my instincts scream, but now I found myself reaching out and snapping their necks. I saw the same tendencies in Charle and to a lesser extent René-a, too. Even the latter no longer threw herself around my neck to babble about her latest idea and she no longer thoughtlessly reached out to grab at me. If I hadn't known the reason, I would have praised the gods for the change in attitude, but the memories weighted me down as much as they did her. More, I selfishly guessed, because little could bother my Sire's mate for long.

The desert sky was blue without a cloud in sight, but Bahn and I protected ourselves from the humans' gazes by draping fabrics around ourselves. I had not told him of my shield just like René-a had not been aware of it until she became Charle's mate, and if Bahn had any gift of his own he said nothing. Gifts were kept close to one's heart, revealed only out of necessity or trust. It was not common that we had a gift, and out of the many I had turned only a few handfuls had been gifted. Only five of them had been gifted in a way that was beneficial for the Kin-Slaying.

"How they look?" I asked Bahn as I followed him to the house where he and his older sister stayed. I had not met his sister yet, but I had only stayed here for a week.

He glanced back at me like I was stupid. "I haven't seen them."

It was glaringly obvious that he avoided the question, but I decided to simply lift a brow and let him worry about when I would ambush him.

We arrived to the hut where he had let me stay, and we ducked inside and into the darkness. Another kin's scent in the air was all the warning I needed and I refrained from startling at the sight of a young woman sitting on the other side of the unlit hearth. My eyes needed no time to adapt to the darkness; the hut let in light that to a human might not have helped more than to give outlines, but to me it was like stepping into the early time of dusk.

The female was far older than her younger brother, perhaps right below thirty, and a deep breath revealed that it was her venom that flowed inside his veins. Her venom smelled young, but not the way a Newborn would smell. Bahn's venom was only slightly black hair was cropped at her shoulders and decorated with pale beads and a thin chain that circled her head, and her red eyes were rimmed with orange just like her brother's. She was frailer and bonier than her younger sibling, with a harder face and shoulders that did not relax upon my polite body language. I liked her immediately.

"Sabelle Swanchild of Sumer", I introduced myself.

"Sabelle." She then said a long name that I could not understand, and her eyes took on a humorous glint when she slowed down and repeated the first part as clearly as she could.

"Narsa", she said and I repeated her name respectfully the way she had repeated mine. "Why are you here?"

I sat down carefully, to show that I did not mean her any trouble and also to make sure she knew I was confident enough to sit down on the ground in her territory. The technically submissive move was turned into nonchalant dominance the way Charle had taught me, or so I hoped – I did not want her to think she could run straight over me, but I did also not want to provoke her unnecessarily when her brother had been so helpful.

"We hear of _Terrors_", I spoke slowly in their language. They did not understand the fifty-years-old Uruk dialect of Sumerian that we spoke in the ziggurat, and so it fell upon me – the guest in their lands – to learn their language. "My Sire is curious, and I is worried."

"Why?" The girl leaned forward, and there was something predatory in her posture. I liked it; she looked like her sire had taught her well. She did not cause misunderstandings in the predatory body language of our kind; there was no war inside her between her lost human habits and her new instincts. She was far better than I had ever been at getting her intentions across. "How does it concern you? Sumer is far away, I know – I ran there once, to Lagash and back. The Terrors have already reached you, then?"

"No." I shook my head slowly and kept her gaze when I realized she was trying to win prominence over me. "The Kin-Slayings is over. We worry for new war. I want to know more of these Terrors, so that we is prepared."

She nodded. "I understand." Her gaze fell to her brother thoughtfully, silently and without fanfare giving me the victory. "I can-"

Bahn coughed by the door and moved to sit down next to me – too close. Instinctually my chest rumbled with a warning growl and my eyes tingled the way they always did when they rapidly turned black. My muscles tensed.

"What?" The boy jerked and snarled back without thought, clamping down in shame the instant his sister shot to her feet on the other side of the room. "Sorry."

"I told you", I said and forced my body out of its reflexive reaction.

"My apologies for my brother's behavior", Narsa said and with a gesture of her hand she sent him out. She licked her lips – a nervous move I had never before seen in our kind. "Please… please do not think him… He is old enough. I swear."

I frowned. What?

"I not know what you say", I told her truthfully. I just hoped she wasn't trying to suggest that I be interested in her brother in a physical or romantic sense.

This seemed to make her more nervous: I had never seen our kind react in such a way. Usually we shut down, or redirected it into anger or avoidance.

"Perhaps… it is best if I show you the Terrors, so I will not explain it wrong…" Narsa looked like she wanted to either throw me out of her village head first or beg me for something. "Bahn has not told you what they look like, then? What they are?"

I shook my head. No, he hadn't. He had refused, in fact, to even discuss how to find them. I had planned to go hunting them on my own, once I had caught their scent.

"Oh." She drew a deep breath and looked me in the eye. "It is horrifying. It makes humans faint. They are created by us Sun-demons, but we do not consider them to be Sun-demons."

I disliked the local name for our kind. It sounded evil, a concept I had never heard of until I followed Charle to Uruk. My people had not believed in evil the way they did here, and so neither did I. Trolls and face-stealers and fairies were mischievous, selfish and cruel when it humored them, but they were not evil beings. Demons I had learned were evil creatures. I did not understand what the two words meant, not truly the way I would if I had grown up with it, but I understood that _demon _and _evil _were two very bad things and that it was not something that I wanted to be described as. If they had to call me anything, they may call me troll – the sunlight made it hard for us to sneak around in the day, and we could both be hard as stone to the touch.

The knowledge that the Terrors were created by our kind made my skin crawl in displeasure. It brought with it new, foreign nightmare fuel: that our venom could create more than kin, and that the transformations I had instigated could have turned wrong. Could I have created one of these Terrors unknowingly, and simply saw it dead before it could stand out as anything but a blood-crazy Newborn? I wanted to imagine that there was more to separate us from these Terrors than blood craze, though – otherwise, why would there be a special word for them? Why not describe them as crazy Sun-demons? Why was there a need to differ between the two, other than the saner counterpart's wish for separation? What had made the humans distinguish between Sun-demons and Terrors enough for words to reach Sumer?

"When can you show me?" I asked.

She looked me in the eye. "Tonight."

* * *

We moved soundlessly through the village, helped by the dark far more than we would ever be hindered by it. The moon was not visible, but that helped keep the shadows from growing long and the colors from being distorted. It also helped the Terrors avoid detection.

Where were they? I looked around and lifted my nose to the air. There was nothing in the air that revealed anything unusual was going on. Beside me, the kin Narsa gestured at me to creep closer to the ground. Terrors had the same scent as we did, the same speed and almost the same strength; I had managed to fool this out of Narsa during the day. All in all, it sounded like Terrors were nothing but kin transformations gone wrong, and as if Terrors were simply mad kin.

A sudden whoosh made me look up from the ground and I felt my eyebrows rise in surprise as Narsa pointed my attention out at the desert: six tiny streaks traveled at high speed across the sand dunes, blowing up sand clouds in their wake. I narrowed my eyes and tried to get a better look at the six beings that traveled parallel to us. They were shorter and frailer than I, limbs pending around them in too-big movements as they ran, and I wondered if they were running bent over to lessen the air resistance or if they had shriveled up like dried peaches during the transformation. It looked almost like they had been humans very old of age before the transformations, and they had shrunken into themselves.

I glanced at Narsa with a frown on my face, and she nodded silently. The beads in her black hair bounced around her shoulders, but though it made a lot of soft sounds as the beads collided it didn't seem to alert the six beings of our presence. They seemed completely unaware that someone could be watching, and I wondered if they were stupid as well as mad. Their run seemed to be for fun and not for any real purpose, for they leaped at each other like a flock of young goats, but at the same time they never stopped running eastward towards the middle of the village.

"Sabelle", Narsa breathed quietly beside me and I looked to her. She gestured up at the hut next to us and I nodded. Together we jumped straight up in the air and sailed over the roof edge, landing quietly on the flat top of the hut.

We pressed our stomachs to the roof, spreading ourselves out to lessen the risk of both being seen and of falling through the frail roof. The six beings were coming closer now, and I felt my eyes widen as far as they could when one of the beings stopped right in my sight.

It was a little child.

She could barely be ten years old, probably not old enough to have had her first period, and her skin was a pretty golden color that took on a strange sheen in the dark night. She was clad in loose fabrics like the rest of the people here, her black hair was cut at her shoulders and several beads still hung in her hair where she hadn't managed to rip them out during games and fights. Her dark red eyes were almost black with hunger and searched the village curiously.

I frowned and threw another glance at Narsa. Of course these weren't the Terrors – were these kin children the prey of choice of Terrors, or perhaps their servants? But Narsa was frowning and looked unsettled, her body trembling now and then in what I could only guess was disgust. I looked at the child again and drew a deep breath to take in her scent. Her venom smelled at least a few decades old, beguiling the youth in the child's face, and I wondered how old the child would feel if I spoke to her. How horrible would it not be to be a sixty-year-old in a ten-year-old child's body? It seemed natural that these children would be drawn to Terrors, who might be too crazy and bloodthirsty to care about how young the children looked physically.

A scream pierced the air and Narsa, the child and I snapped our heads in its direction, our eyes narrowing. Another scream followed and the child frowned, then she was off in a blur. Narsa and I shared a glance and threw ourselves into motion, following the child at a safe distance. I couldn't help but wonder how the child hadn't noticed us – our scent would be all over the place and if I could smell her then she should have been able to smell me, even if I was downwind. The chase lasted for only a distance of a few houses, then we were forced to stop to remain at a decent distance.

We arrived to a bloodbath. The five other beings, children like the first girl we had observed, were ripping into four adult humans with less control and skill than any Newborn I had ever witnessed. Pieces of the humans were already spreading around the ground and the children were quickly being drenched in wasted blood. The humans screamed in agony and around us I heard the rest of the village wake up in their huts – their heartbeats quickened and their breathes changed, and I heard them whisper to each other in terror. No one dared to leave their houses and I could only imagine the horror they felt. The children laughed, sweet and wonderful giggles, and threw pieces of flesh at each other. One of them leapt at another and they wrestled on the ground, licking blood of each other and biting without fangs at each other's skins. They behaved like cursed children. The foreign word 'demon' took a firmer shape in my mind.

Narsa and I stayed within sight of the blood feast, though I secretly stretched my bubble around us to protect us from the playing children. Narsa kept glancing at me, but it took me a while to understand what had her so worked up. Her little brother Bahn, who had helped me learn their language and of some of their customs, was only around fifteen years old when he was turned. It was young enough that I could easily guess that Narsa worried I'd draw unfortunate parallels between these children and him.

I tilted my head at Narsa and gestured at the children.

"I not understand", I told her in her language. "Why call them _Terrors_ if they are only children?"

She looked startled and for a moment looked like she'd hiss at me to be silent, but then her eyes went to the children and widened. The other kin had not even glanced at us, even though I had not tried to be silent. My bubble protected us from their attention, but Narsa did not know about my shield. She could not know that my shield was slowly becoming more and more powerful – nowadays, even something as attention-grabbing as talking nearby did not lessen the effect of my shield.

"They do not age", Narsa said slowly, and at my frown she hurriedly continued, "Mentally. They remain children. They do not understand what they are or how to behave or…"

I turned to look at the children again and frowned. A group of men had surrounded the area with torches in their hands and the children crowded together, unsure how to react to what seemed to be a novel situation to them. Their laughter had stopped and they looked confused and cornered. Red eyes went around the area and there was a surge of fear in their group as the men came closer – large and furious and intimidating and out for revenge – and something surged through me that I had not felt since I was human. It took me long to realize what it was, but by then I had strolled into the open area where the confrontation was happening.

I felt protective of these children. Never before had I seen children of our kin, and they felt precious to me. Children were always precious – so few survived, and so much depended on them. My shield fell away around me.

"That's enough." My voice carried across the area with authority I had learned only from mimicking Charle during the Kin-Slaying.

The humans and the kin children whirled around to stare at me in surprise and I pushed down the crawling sensation under my skin when their eyes landed on me. Instinct urged me to raise my shield again and keep them from paying me such disturbingly intense attention, but I kept myself under control.

"Who are you?" one of the children wondered.

They all tilted their heads to the side and their red eyes seemed to judge me as mild-tempered and dull. They could not be further from the truth: I was the judge here.

"I am Sabelle Swanchild, one of the Sun-Gods of Sumer", I told them with my best local accent. "We won the Kin-Slaying against an army of hundreds. I am here to keep the peace."

This seemed to unsettle them and they shifted their weights around and shuffled their feet against the dusty ground. One of them looked angry, his face pulled into a sour grimace.

"I don't care who you are or what you've done", he spat and took several blurry steps towards me in a jerky motion meant to scare me off. He was not strong or fast enough to create loud bangs in the air the way I could if I wanted to, and I could easily track his every twitch and jerk without losing focus on the details of his tattered clothes. "Leave us alone!"

"Calm yourself", I warned and felt my upper lip curl back in response to his rude behavior.

There was something neither human nor kin about the boy that made the hairs on my arms stand up. He didn't move fluidly like one of us or unconsciously like a human, but instead jerkily as if it was hard for him to end movements. If he lashed out with a hand it stopped abruptly as if he otherwise would end up flinging the arm too far and toppling over as his balance shifted, and his every step forward was followed by a slight lean backwards as if he otherwise would continue forward face first.

His muscles coiled under his skin and his teeth bared, his eyes turned black and his face twisted in fury. With a screech befitting his rough twelve years of age he threw himself head first at me, intending to stop a foot in front of me as if the sudden movement would startle me into leaping away. Battle instincts had me reacting the opposite way to what he wanted: instead of jumping back I reached out and snatched him in the air, bringing him around and setting him down in front of me with his back to me. My stronger hands clamped down on his and held them tightly against his back, my left foot holding down his against the ground so that he could not try to flip out of my grip.

"Are you done?" I asked, silently squishing down my own surprise at my own reaction.

I had never before reacted in such a… non-violent way to an attack. There had been no instincts in me screaming to kill the child where he was, nothing that made me snap his neck mid-move.

The children looked both terrified and in awe of me. I had appeared out of nowhere, and my introduction seemed to have shaken their confidence enough that they now listened to my voice. For the first time I wished René-a was here with me – everyone loved René-a.

I had to take a slightly different approach than someone who wanted to mother them. I was not sure how they would react if I tried to be their mother, but I could imagine it would end about as well as it had when René-a tried to mother me.

The boy trembled in my grip, but I did not release him yet.

"You have caused unrest along the river Nile", I spoke and tried to speak as clearly and correctly as I possibly could. "We feel responsible make sure you not start second Kin-Slaying."

I could see that they had heard of the Kin-Slaying: like the first time I had mentioned it, they twitched and looked at each other. That was good – it meant they must also have heard of our group, and that my appearance would not seem too out of the blue. I did not want them to think me a fake or my name a hoax.

"We would never do that!" one of the children, a girl of perhaps five years as a human, exclaimed and stepped forward.

The other children closest to her immediately went to grab her clothes so that she wouldn't go closer to me. I observed their behavior around each other, surprised by how comfortable they seemed to be with having each other near. They seemed much like René-a had before the Kin-Slaying, I thought – happy to cling to each other and let others touch them.

I ignored the girl's outcry. "Who sired you?" They frowned and I tried again. "Who turned you into Sun-demons?"

Their confused faces did not light up in understanding.

"Haven't we always been Sun-demons?" one of the youngest asked in a childish tone, and I thought he looked like he must have been only three years old as a human.

Another child, this one a bit older, scoffed. "No, silly. We were turned by the pale man in blue."

"Man in Blue!" another screamed and threw her hands in the air. She twirled twice and the rest of the children laughed, a sound that made all the human men around us swallow hard and look sick to their stomachs. I thought it was a wondrous sound, but there was recognition in the men's eyes that made me wonder if they had known these children before they became Terrors.

The children started to chant "Man in Blue!" and it took a loud snarl from me to make them silent and still again. The sound made them freeze against the ground and I wondered confused if they had never heard an adult kin snarl before. It seemed as if what they lacked was discipline and experience of our kin, the way René-a had before the Kin-Slaying.

"Where is the Man in Blue?" I asked.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Narsa move, and I threw her a questioning look. She frowned and shrugged her shoulders.

The children looked at me like I was stupid, but none of them could answer me. In the end, it was as if none of them had ever seen or met this Man in Blue. It didn't feel far-fetched to imagine that the man had turned them and left them to their fates in the desert, and that this was the reason to why the children had not matured mentally. Perhaps it was abandonment that had caused their minds to become unstable.

"If you come with me, I will teach you better ways to hunt."

"Funnier?" the girl I had first seen asked.

I lifted a brow. "Yes. Much _funnier_." I had no idea what the word meant – it was not one Bahn or Narsa had taught me yet – but I could guess well enough what they were trying to say. It seemed as if games was everything to the children who had become stuck in their own bodies and minds.

Narsa looked like she wanted to strangle me, and I could see in her eyes that she would not join me in my new purpose. That was alright – I was sure I would end up fighting her at some point anyway, if anything because of her young brother's manners, and I knew she would not want to leave her brother or have him near these Terrors. Perhaps the sickness or curse that they carried was contagious to others with young physiques. It would explain why Narsa was so worried before that I would assume Bahn was "too young", and why Bahn did not want to go near these children.

I let go off the boy in my arms slowly and gave him time to move out of my way before I carefully approached the group of children. They all moved out of my way, but it did not seem to be out of instinct because the moment they saw that I was not attacking them they crowded around me like humans would crowd around Charle under the sun. I readied myself for the flood of anger and hostility that I knew would come with their proximity, but even as their fingers brushed against my clothes I felt nothing but curiosity and protectiveness. It was as if I subconsciously did not count them as kin, but instead as the rare animals I had approached during my travels alone, or the horses I had watched be domesticated in the northeast beyond the magical sea where nothing sunk. Perhaps I was simply confident that even in group they could not hurt me.

I stretched my shield out and around them until they were all under my protected. None of them seemed aware of the change, but the humans around us immediately lost their interest and began to discuss what to do with the horrible mess that the Terrors had left behind.

"Come on all," I said, "Let's go."

I turned to run away from the village and the children followed me closely, screaming and shouting happily. I did not think they knew why they were following me or what I meant to do with them, but they seemed largely unconcerned.

"Where are you from, _Pale One_?" the first girl I had seen asked and came up to run beside me, skipping along at a pace that humans would have a hard time seeing.

"Sumer", I told her, though I did not know what she had called me. "It is far away for humans, but not for us."

"I'm Tiy", the little girl said. "What's your name?"

I glanced at her as I ran. I had told them my name, could they not remember that? Could their curse or illness affect them so much that they could not remember flawlessly as the rest of our kin?

"I have told you my name", I told her.

Tiy frowned and her eyes flashed. "I don't care!" she declared. "I want to know your name now!"

"Sabelä", I told her slowly. "Sabelle. Child of Swans, Swanchild. I have many names."

Though my way of speaking seemed to grant on their nerves, the children accepted this somewhat.

"Pale One!" the oldest boy laughed, and the others quickly picked up my newest nickname. "Pale One!"

I was not sure where I was taking them, but I knew I needed to move them out of the village before the humans decided to strike back. The thought of moving them back to Sumer, where I knew the lands and people well, crossed my mind but I pushed it away for the time being. I preferred to keep them in their home area, where they would not feel lost and where I could later leave them without abandoning them to their fates in a foreign land where people spoke another language.

The question of how to actually teach them the control and give them the experience they needed to outgrow whatever curse was on them was a hard one. I wasn't sure where to begin. René-a had seemed like a lost case to me all those years, but she had become far more tolerable since the Kin-Slaying. At the same time I could never with a clear consciousness lead so many children into a war of any kind on purpose. (Not to mention, I would have to _start _a war for that to be possible.) There had to be another way. But how do you teach children who do not think they need to be taught?

I stopped when we reached a small oasis among the dunes, in the opposite direction of the river Nile and where we would have been far more likely to encounter humans. For the time being, I needed their full attention and René-a had taught me that control could not be taught to an unwilling apprentice.

The small waterhole in the middle of the oasis housed many animals at this time of the night, and I stopped right outside of the oasis.

"Can you hear the animals?" I asked the children.

They frowned and nodded, as if they could not understand what I was trying to point out.

"I want to see them!" one of the children, the boy I had held in my grip not long ago, called.

"Soon." I gestured to the oasis. "I will show you how to hunt animals, for days when you hear no humans near."

They looked at me like I was the one with an illness, but all followed me when I gestured at them to do so. I spotted a large, familiar desert animal that I did not know the name of, though I knew it fed on vegetation and could go long distances without water. There was no hunt, for I blurred across the sand and hit the animal from behind before any of the creatures knew what was happening. My abrupt loss of motion created a bang of air around me that made the animals around me startle and run in fear and I heard the children exclaim in amazement. I pushed the animal's neck to the ground and bit down, sucking it dry in moments. The body kicked a few times, but beyond what I wiped off from my lips and chin I had spilt very little blood.

Before I could do anything about it the children blurred into action, screaming like angry spirits as they rushed to and fro between the animals. Their kills were not as messy as before, though if it was because they were actually trying to mimic me or because they were already fed I didn't know. Within moment all the animals in the oasis were dead.

The next two fortnights followed in the same way. I would lead the six children from place to place in the desert and always would they try to mimic my behavior, with poor results but large smiles on their faces. It was hard to blame them for their failures, I found, though their presence was starting to grate on my nerves much like an adult kin would. More and more I began to see the Terrors in them.

"I want to play _Fish and Goat_!" one of the children, Nedjem, screamed one afternoon. "Now!"

I did not know what "Fish and Goat" was, and this had made him very angry at me. His little face was scrunched up and his red eyes were furious, though it was hard to take him seriously while he stomped his feet like the five-year-old he looked to be. We were outside of a small village by the river, and I had begun my lessons on how to move around humans without harming them.

"Then go play with the others", I said to him and gestured at where the other children were playing in the shallow water at the river bank.

"I want to play with you!"

"And I don't want to play", I told him shortly and turned my back to him. If they could not behave, I would not play with them – such were my rules. In practice, it meant I very rarely had any part in their games.

He screeched angrily and stomped away, and for a moment all seemed to settle down. Then the screams began. The scent of blood became overbearing. A few moments later, there was no village left.

Over and over I found myself in the same situation. All would be well and the children seemed to pick up on my teachings, and then one of them would throw a tantrum bigger than the others and there would be another bloodbath. Over and over it happened.

Two children I had lured away from the rest after a fortnight. I had wrapped us in my bubble so that the others would not be able to notice what was happening, and then I snapped their two necks in quick succession. I burned the bodies and returned to the other children, claiming only that they had been bad children and that such things were what happened to those who could not control themselves. I could not hide the scent of burning kin that wafted through the air and stuck to my clothes. It scared the others only for a short time, though they would not walk away with me alone after that. The children I had killed had been the primary troublemakers – not like normal human children testing the limits of my patience, but instead cruel and impossible to get through to. They reveled in the bloodshed in ways I had only seen in the Newborns I had created and shaped for the Kin-Slaying. I could not allow them to continue to influence the rest of the group. For a while, my efforts of removing the hopeless cases seemed to work. The loss of bad influences made the other children more open to my lessons on behavior and control, but even so it was not enough. It seemed as if another child took the lost troublemakers' place. I could not solve the problem by removing the particularly bad ones.

Especially not when the children seemed to draw others to them, and I suspected that they purposely brought with them their new friends that they met while I was not nearby. For a while they were sixteen children to my lonely watch.

The little girl Tiy was the child who kept closest to me. Like I, she enjoyed asking questions and in opposite to me she would often talk endlessly to the humans we encountered.

"Why do we have to have control?" she asked me one evening while the rest of the children played some kind of game in the sand.

I thought hard about it, because I had never thought about it. Why did we need control?

"Because control is what allows us to be around others", I said slowly. "It would be a very lonely existence if we could not listen or speak to others when we wanted to. And if you lose control, you cannot decide what to do. Don't you want to decide what to do for yourself? To do that, you need control."

In my case it was more a matter of being able to _watch _than about talking, at least with humans – the only kin I felt the urge to keep in contact with was Charle. I enjoyed asking questions, because it was the only way to learn other than through observation, but I did not enjoy small talk. But Tiy loved to talk and I thought she would appreciate my answer more if I changed it to suit her. The Terrors were adamant of doing everything themselves and deciding everything themselves.

Mostly the need for control in myself now was because I did not appreciate the mess of the children's kills. All I could think about when I saw the torn up bodies and the flesh that the children threw at each other for laughs, was my husband crushed in my hands. I did not like to see the insides of my kills. I told no one of this, of course, for such a view was viewed as a weakness even if it was only a personal preference. I did not like not being in control, and more and more that was the feeling I got around the children.

I had looked around for the "Man in Blue" but had found nothing. If he existed he was no longer creating hordes of Terrors, for all the kin children we encountered moved alone or with an older sire. The adults I met, all of them familiar with Terrors, shared my sentiments much of the time: the quest to achieve control in Terrors seemed impossible.

After twelve years, I had found nothing to give me new hope of succeeding. We no longer encountered other Terrors around the Nile, and I learned soon after the three year mark that three adult kin in the area had taken it upon themselves to wipe the children out.

I saw them coming at a distance and heard them long before the children would have had any idea. My shield flared to life around me, cocooning me from the approaching kin. Just as the children became aware of the three adults, Tiy stumbled into me and entered the small bubble around me. Her eyes immediately went to me and she latched on to my legs, looking up at me happily and completely unaware of what was going to happen. Around us the other children stopped their games and turned to look at the new adults, and there were excited smiles on their faces. They had no idea that they were about to be slayed, and had no instincts to tell them that three adults running in such a way straight at them could not mean games and new friends.

It did not take the adults long to hunt down the Terrors. No one spared Tiy or I a glance, and the little girl trembled in fear next to me. I did not hold on to her, curious to see if she would lose her temperament and fly at the adults in anger, but there was only fear to be found in Tiy and she clung to me like a baby monkey. The other Terrors were put in a pile and lit afire, and then the three adults left as abruptly as they had arrived.

I did not feel ashamed to say I was relieved to be free of the burden, though I did feel like I perhaps should feel ashamed.

Once the three were out of sight and could no longer be heard I let my shield fade into the back of my mind again and motioned for Tiy to let go off me. Her presence and touch no longer went ignored by my territorial instincts, and I did not like when she clung to me.

"Where are we going?" Tiy asked and hurried to keep pace with me across the dunes.

I wondered what to do and where to go. I had tried all I could think of. In the background the bodies of the Terrors burnt and created a pillar of sweet-smelling purple and green smoke.

"Home."

I brought the Terror with me back to Sumer.

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_**Poor Bella, she's really got no clue.**_


	9. The Swan's Only Rule, Part 1

_**A/N: A short recap for you all, since this update is very late. To **__littlehughesy __**and my other amazing reviewers, there's a short note at the end of the chapter for you.**_

_**Bella (at this time called Sabelle) was turned into a vampire around the year 4000 BC by Charlie (Charle). They traveled across prehistoric Europe and down to Sumer/Mesopotamia in modern day Middle East, where they were greeted as Sun-Gods and built a large temple. A human woman was presented to them and turned out to be Charlie's mate, Renée (René-a), who was soon thereafter turned. The three of them fought a long and groundbreaking war against another coven from Asia – the first vampire war, dubbed the 'Kin-Slaying'. Bella lost her head, but they won in the end. After the war, Bella traveled to the river Nile to investigate the rumors of "Terrors", which shockingly turned out to be vampire children let loose in a feral pack on Egypt. One of these children, and the only one to survive in the long run, was a small girl named Tiy. Bella and Tiy set off towards Sumer.**_

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_**Another OC is introduced in this chapter – sorry, but he will be necessary. I promise there will be no Bella/OC romance.**_

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**Childe of the Swans**

_**Chapter Nine: The Swans' Only Rule, Part 1**_

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_**3791 BC, Middle East**_

When I arrived to our ziggurat in southernmost Sumer, it was the middle of summer and people were bustling around the complex of smaller buildings around our temple. Even from far, far away the sight was imposing, and I heard little Tiy gasp next to me when we reached the top of a particularly tall sand dune and met a wonderful view of the ziggurat.

"It's flawless!" Tiy said and bounced in the sand, her shoulder-length black hair flying around her head. The few beads that had managed to cling on and survive her rough years as a Terror tinkled in the summer air.

I smiled and ran faster, leaving the ten-year-old in the sandy dust behind me. Even from far, far away I could see a sparkling diamond at the top of the ziggurat, and I knew my skin's reflections too would be visible to them.

A feeling of warmth washed through me as I blurred up the long stairs and came to an abrupt stop in front of my Sire. Air snapped around me, a crack like that of a whip to announce my stop. I had not seen him in twelve years, longer than I had ever been away from him before, and I felt suddenly light and like I could smile without end for years.

"Sabelä", he greeted me warmly, and his dark red eyes crinkled happily as he slowly stepped up to me. "Oh, how I have missed you."

"As I have missed you." I smiled. It felt good to speak to him again, in a language I was more comfortable with.

There was hesitation in our movement around each other, I realized with a stab of pain in my chest. Even as we carefully moved to embrace with one arm each, low growls rumbled in our chests and I knew the tiny hair on my arms and neck stood at end. The hierarchy between us had always been firmly established, but now I didn't know how to behave. It had only been twelve years, but it felt as if it had been a hundred. It was no longer a reflexive reaction to step down and follow his body language. I had not forgotten – I could never forget – but it was no longer habit. He must have changed, I thought, because surely twelve years could not change me so much that I was at a loss at how to treat my own Sire.

"I have much to tell you, Sire", I said as René-a moved up next to her mate and nodded at me with a bright smile.

We hugged, too, though it was a tense move on both our parts and I could tell that she had lost much of her confidence in approaching me as her child. We no longer smelled of each other, I realized and sniffed the air. It was strange to not smell my own scent on her, though it still lingered in the ziggurat. I had claimed this ziggurat just like the other two had, and such things did not fade even in a hundred years. Twelve years was only long enough that the scent washed away from skin and clothes, but not from things I had purposely claimed.

Another kin stood behind Charle and René-a; tall and broad across the shoulders and almost the same shade of black skin as Narme had had. Djehutimose was his name, and when he saw me he smiled warmly. It made me ashamed to realize that I did not immediately remember his name – after all, this one was my Childe, turned right after the Kin-Slaying to relay our words. His scent blew towards me, an instinctually pleasant reminder that he had my venom inside of him. I wondered if my scent invoked the same feeling in Charle. During the Kin-Slaying I had never paid much attention to the bond between the Newborns and myself, but now I could feel it. Like a responsibility I instinctually grasped after even without knowing him personally. From his smile, wholly platonic as it thankfully was, he felt the Sire bond, too.

At that moment Tiy rushed up the long stairs, her bright red eyes wide in wonder.

Immediately René-a lost her composure and Charle stared openly. Djehutimose, too, startled. Tiy stopped next to me, bouncing on the balls of her feet and swinging her arms around herself impatiently. She, like I, was dressed in a simple, colorless wool tunica with a braided leather belt around her waist. Our feet were bare and our skin covered in sand, though she was still golden hued under the dirt and blood that clung to her like a second skin. Despite her unclean skin, she was inhumanly sweet and beautiful.

"Oh", René-a breathed. "My gods…"

Charle looked equally surprised and he threw me a look.

"A child? Is that possible?" he asked. I knew Tiy would not understand the Sumerian words.

"This is a Terror", I said. "Her name is Tiy and she is from the river banks of the Nile. I have not managed to teach her control."

Charle nodded, and we turned to look at René-a, who was gushing over the child like a mother hen. Her fingers traveled over Tiy's hair and played with the beads, and the two females – though lacking a common language – seemed to have connected better than I would ever have hoped. Like I had at first, René-a seemed to feel no instinctual wariness for the Terror and possibly for the first time since the Kin-Slaying she looked like she enjoyed touching another other than Charle.

"Is she a danger?" Charle asked.

"To the humans? Yes. Very much. To us? Not at all. She is as dangerous as a horse."

Charle laughed and nodded. "Why don't we take a walk, Sabelä? I think the girls can handle themselves."

I smiled. "I would like that, Sire."

We left René-a and Tiy on the ziggurat, and though I for a moment wondered if that was a good idea I quickly pushed it out of my mind. With all the toys in the ziggurat for the two to explore, it was unlikely that Tiy would throw a tantrum. René-a would give the Terror whatever she wanted. Djehutimose would be there, too – that meant two kin to keep an eye on Tiy, even if I didn't know how controlled he was yet.

Charle and I walked out into the desert, bowing our heads to the many servants on our way.

"How have your travels been, my Childe?"

I told him of the twelve years I had been away and spoke briefly about the many animals and human customs that I had encountered. I spoke about the weather and the wind and the scent of the air, and the taste of the blood of lizards and strange animals. I spoke about the clothes of humans far away, and the kin I had encountered. I mentioned Bahn and Narsa, the two who had led me to the Terrors, and then I spoke a long time about my time with the horde of Terrors I had tried to tame into civilized beings. With a low voice I recounted my inability to help and the failure of my attempts to teach, and my unplanned decision to bring Tiy back with me to Sumer.

"I have missed you greatly, Sire." I looked at the endless ocean not far from our ziggurat: it seemed a little bit closer than it had before, though it must have been a faulty impression. "How have things been here?"

He smiled at me and spoke briefly of René-a and their dealings with local groups of kin – mostly peaceful talks – and of the humans of Sumer. Then he patted the sand dune under us with a hand and gestured at me to sit down with him.

"We no longer accept innocent sacrifices", Charle said and at my raised eyebrow he grinned. "René-a didn't feel comfortable knowing that the humans were taking women and sending them here for sacrifice."

I snorted and nodded. I could imagine René-a standing in front of Charle, blood across her chest and her hands at her hips as she ranted that it was not right. Such a thing must hit too close home for comfort to the king's daughter. It may never have been voiced, but we all knew that René-a had been sent to our ziggurat by her father as a peace-offering – whether as a woman for pleasure or a dinner.

"Instead, the humans from across Sumer brings us their criminals and prisoners of war. Less goat for us, now", he joked and I laughed.

The sound felt strange leaving my mouth. When had I laughed last? It must have been a long, long time ago. I looked at Charle fondly. I had missed these talks. The last time… it must have been before René-a came to us that we went out alone like this. It was far, far too long ago and I told him as much.

"Yes, I agree." He sighed and leaned back against his hands. "Far too long."

He gestured at the ocean and changed subject. "There are boats now, big enough to carry twenty men."

I looked at him in amazement. "Twenty?"

"They hail from far away, and they come here with goods we have never seen before. All the humans have those _carts_. The wheels we were shown before you left are the big thing now – a wheel maker is respected as much as a spear-maker, if not more, in both Larsa and Ur."

When Charle and I leisurely walked home it was with less distance and far less awkwardness. I felt myself slipping back into our usual pattern, falling into step next to him and harmonizing my moves to his familiar ones. The need to speak slowly drained away and I basked in the silent presence of my Sire. I would not have hesitated to admit that I did not want our walk to end.

"There have been words amongst our kin that there are other groups that have grown powerful in your homelands." Charle glanced at me as we walked up the elaborate stairs of the ziggurat. "We have sent out some of the subordinates-"

"Subordinates?" I asked.

He nodded and smiled proudly. "It was René-a's idea: kin servants. They are no longer Newborns – that is, we _also_ have two Newborns… I thought maybe you would like to help me with them. They used to like you."

He was referring to the Newborn armies, I knew, and I dipped my head in gratitude to his compliment even if it wasn't true. They had only turned to me because I was less outspoken: my silent, flexible orders and my disinterest in the Newborns' relations with each other were often received better than René-a's more talkative, mothering style of command at the ziggurat. I hardly drew Newborns to myself – the opposite really, but they usually got used to me out of necessity. I was not a leader that people automatically followed (that was Charle) nor one to call them to me (like René-a) – I preferred that they came to me in their own time. If anything, it made it so that I mostly dealt with the more stable Newborns.

"Why?" I asked. Why did we need kin servants when we already had the humans at our call?

"It is far more valuable than I would have thought", Charle said. "They can take more subtle commands and can run long distances to leave messages. There are three with us now – two more are spreading our words, and of course we have the Newborn I mentioned."

"Then there are eight kin in the ziggurat now?" I asked in chock. "How will we manage that?"

Charle stopped and looked at me closely. His eyes searched mine, and then he leaned in to whisper in my ear at a volume that even the others nearby would never be able to catch. His breath tickled my skin and I shuddered, torn between growling and purring. Part of me remembered a time when we were so close that this kind of proximity would make me relaxed, but the part of me that had been alone for twelve years (albeit in the company of the Terrors) wanted to throw him away from me.

"It's René-a", he whispered. "She is gifted. I realized only five years ago, when we first turned a Newborn again. Others… they become mesmerized by her. They love her almost as much as I do."

I felt my eyes go wide and I glanced up at the top of the ziggurat as if to check if anyone was nearby. The sloping sides of the ziggurat meant that there could be people just inside the wall below the stairs where we stood, but that felt somehow further away than the long distance I could see.

"She is my mate, Sabelä", he growled at me and I looked away in shame. Somehow he had been able to tell the horrible thought that had just been about to cross my mind. "I have not told her about her gift – I do not feel anything good will come from it. But this gift cannot harm her as long as she does not use it on purpose and it is without doubt as useful to our group as your gift and my own."

I nodded. I could see what he meant, even if the revelation sent cold shivers down my spine. My mind spun and I tried to think back; had I ever noticed anything that could have been proof of René-a's gift? Now that I knew the truth it seemed as if it had always been so, but I knew that if I was to be honest I had never noticed anything. Most of the people I had watched René-a interacted with had loved her, simply because they had been her family. The priests and servants had adored her, as much as they had been angry at her for staying in that first holy ziggurat where we had been kept prisoner. But what Charle was suggesting was far bigger than being loved by those she knew intimately.

"It does not work on me", I murmured.

"Few gifts work against your shield, Sabelä", Charle said in a louder voice and continued to walk up the last steps. "The pain-making kin from the Ox-passage strait could not make your head hurt, and the Newborns in our own armies could rarely affect you. I would lie if I said I was surprised."

"I bet your head would feel strange if you told such lies, Charle", I joked at the truth-seer and he laughed loudly.

"Just as you must feel absent-minded when you look into a water reflection", Charle threw back at me.

I laughed and shook my head at him. We reached the summit and walked through the walled garden, and I marveled out loud at the flowers and bushes, insects and little animals. It was an oasis in the desert, raised high above the sand dunes and the ocean beyond, and in the middle of the plateau – surrounding the stairs leading down into the ziggurat – was a beautiful pond of clear river water. Water fowl swam in the pond, and I gasped: in the middle of the water swam three large white birds that could not be mistaken for anything but my namesakes.

"Swans!" I gasped and pointed childishly. "Charle! There are swans! In Sumer!"

I looked at him over my shoulder as I sunk to my knees at the edge of the pond, and I saw him smile happily at my reaction. At the moment I did not care that I must seem young and inexperienced. I turned back to the swans, watching as they slowly swam towards me. Their eyes were alert and though they looked to be suffering slightly under the harsh sun they looked healthy and even more kingly than I remembered. They did not seem at all afraid of me, though I supposed the many kin in the ziggurat must have desensitized them to our predatory scents and sparkling skin.

"They are yours", Charle said and put a hand on my shoulder.

I glanced at him in surprise and saw that he was holding out a hand of breadcrumbs for me. Confused I took them from him, but I understood what he was trying to tell me when the swans immediately focused on the human food in my hands. I held my hand out and was barely aware of how I was holding my breath as the three water birds slowly glided over to me and began to take the food out of my hand. They were just as elegant as I remembered.

"I'm feeding swans from my hand." I looked at Charle happily. "Now I only need to find tame lynxes, and I will have proven you right, Charle!"

"Yes, that you have", Charle laughed. "To think I did not believe you! I could barely understand the concept of domesticated sheep – horses and water fowl seems like such a foreign concept to me."

"I will need to find a large cat to domesticate!" I smiled widely at him and turned to admire the swans again. "Where are they from? How did you get them here?"

"Actually, it is a pretty funny story involving lots of humans, some kin and a large boat – I will tell you later, when you have reacclimatized. Kin in your homeland had heard of a 'Swanchild' among us, and sent these birds as a peace offering from his group. The swans arrived only a few moon cycles ago."

"They are flawless", I told him. "Thank you."

Charle could easily have killed them and drained them, like the kin who had sent them must have expected. Instead he had let build a pond for them and kept them, not knowing when I would return form my search of the rumored Terrors.

"I have missed you", Charle said instead.

"And I you", I told him.

We entered the ziggurat in high spirits, thinking nothing of the scent of blood that wafted through the air until we stepped into the temple that made up the first and highest floor. The room, as wide as the ziggurat was from one end to the other without anything but pillars and the outer walls holding the ceiling up, bathed in blood and human bodies. Djehutimose stood to the side when we entered, and though he was splashed with blood and his eyes were bright red I could tell he was not the main cause of the chaos. Instead my eyes went to Tiy, who stood right in front of us with her hands on a miniature ship of copper and emeralds. She was covered from head to toe in blood, and there was a large smile on her face when she saw Charle and I arrive down the stairs.

"Tiy. I have told you not to create a mess", I ground out as calmly as I could in her mother tongue.

She looked like I had slapped her, and I guessed my body language gave off such intentions even though I did not plan on acting on it.

"I want the ship", she said in the same language and held up the ship for me to see. It was pretty, admittedly, but also useless and I did not understand why the child would want it.

"That is not reason to kill all the humans, child", Charle said and though he did not know Tiy personally there was disappointment in his face.

Tiy shrunk further where she stood, even if she didn't understand the words Charle spoke, and her gaze went to the helpless René-a next to her. The older female was drenched in blood, having both tried to stop the bloodbath and end the misery of those who did not immediately die when Tiy had moved on, and there was so much shame in her eyes that it made me unwilling to look at her.

"Thank you, René-a", I murmured and walked up to her. "You can clean up yourself, if you wish." Charle and I could take over now.

She gave me a grateful glance and left towards the lower levels where the bedchambers were – mine in the north, theirs in the south. I could hear more servants move downstairs, and I knew they would provide a bath for Charle's mate.

I looked back at Charle, and he drew a deep breath and nodded. I could see in his face that he wanted to help this ill child.

"We have a lot of work to do."

* * *

_**To answer some of my wonderful reviewers from last chapter: (and a big thank-you to everyone who's taken the time to review!)**_

_littlehughesy: __**I'm afraid those three vampires last chapter were not the Volturi. Their grandparent's haven't been born yet.**_

_XXX1994: __**Yeah, I agree it's slow. It will be picking up, but it will take some time to get to 2008. Currently I have no plans to abandon this, though! We're closing in on some new canon character introductions, yay!**_

_telaviv: __**That's… actually very convincing. Good point!**_

_Guest 228: __**I did, very briefly. However, none of these three characters seem like the… sharing kind. So no, no threesome or triangle.**_

_**I do agree that as far as healthy relationships based on mutual understanding and respect goes, Jasper wins. But maybe the extreme culture shock between broody, angsty Edward and simplistic, ancient Bella would be more in line with the story I seem to be building up to? Hm… the easy route or the hard route?**_


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